The Reign of the Kingfisher

by T. J. Martinson

  On its cover a black-and-white photograph of a massive crowd, taken from somewhere far above, bodies filling every single breadth of space. Atop the photograph the title: Halcyon Days: The Reign of the Kingfisher. Beneath the title and beneath the photograph, in much smaller type, was the name of the author: Marcus Waters.

  “When the Kingfisher died thirty years ago, we gave him a funeral.” The masked man’s voice was digitally modulated in an affectless drone that flattened the vowels. A voice scrambler. He pointed at the cover photograph with a gloved finger and then turned to address the camera. “This photograph was taken on that day. Look at all those people. Thousands strong. They are mourning him. This whole city mourned him. Chicago wore black and the citizens gathered at Promontory Point. Do you remember this, those of you who were there?”

  The masked man set the book down and stepped back from the camera until he stood next to the office chair and its prisoner. He rocked back and forth.

  “It was January of 1984 and we stood in quiet formation as the mayor spread the ashes across a frozen Lake Michigan. We listened to those bagpipes and we watched them spread the ashes around the ice until they dispersed. The mayor stood in front of a microphone and he said some nice things about heroes, about hope. And when it was finally over, everyone shuffled back home through the cold.”

  He cleared his throat and the hostage in the chair twisted desperately beneath the ropes.

  “The next year, the crime rate not only rose, but it rose exponentially. The Kingfisher left behind a vacuum that criminals were all too happy to fill. The police ignored it and the rest of us could do nothing to stop it. And to this day, here we are, living in one of the most dangerous cities in America. Even the world. A city where dozens of people die every weekend. The anonymous dozens. Stray bullets passing through windows, doors. Children shot on their way to school in the morning. Children with their backpacks on their shoulders, walking the streets they know. And still. And still.”

  He breathed in and out, in and out, as though waiting for the irregular rhythm of his breath to take on some meaning.

  “Here is the uncomfortable truth. None of it needed to happen. The body pulled out of the Chicago River that night in 1984, which the police claimed to be the Kingfisher, was not actually the Kingfisher. The police knew this, of course, because they helped the Kingfisher fake his death and desert this city. They knew the consequences, but they did so anyway, because they do not care about us, just like the Kingfisher does not care about us. It’s about time we recognize this. All of us.”

  He picked up the camera. It shook in his hands and the image blurred. When it steadied, he panned over two remaining hostages, both of whom were bound to office chairs, masked by burlap sacks. The gunman set the camera back down where it had been and again stood in the center of the frame next to the hostage he had brought forth. With a flourish, the gunman removed the mask from the hostage’s head. An older man, his bald head dripping with sweat. His teeth bared against a rope tied around his head and digging into his mouth.

  The gunman stepped back and raised the pistol to the hostage’s head.

  “No,” Marcus whispered. “No.”

  The gunman continued, “To the chief of the Chicago Police Department, Gregory Stetson, if you wish to exonerate yourself and the rest of your force of this charge, I urge you to release the medical examiner’s report conducted on the body you later claimed to be the Kingfisher. The very same report that you and your predecessors, oddly enough, have never released to the public. These hostages at my disposal are scared, and they should be scared. Because they are temporary. There will be others, as many as necessary. Because every second that passes that the report is not released is a second in which they may die. Just so.”

  He pulled back the hammer of the pistol and it clicked like a plaything.

  He pushed the barrel of the gun against the hostage’s temple. The hostage closed his eyes while the gunman adjusted his feet like a batter at the plate. He was still for a moment, so still that it appeared as though the video had frozen, but then there was a static eruption of sound. It came somehow off-tempo, premature. Marcus jumped in his seat. The prisoner’s body slumped sideways, a spray of blood and brain matter freckling the wall. The man pushed the chair out of the frame. He turned back to the camera and knelt, slowly, his masked face once again filling the screen.

  The camera shook and went still, frozen on the pale, indelible, nightmarish grin.

  There was a depth to Marcus’s sudden numbness, as though he could plunge into it and never fully return. The floor shifted beneath him. The walls seemed to expand and implode with each breath struggling out of his lungs, all of his surroundings receding into a narrow, dark tunnel.

  “What else happens?” Marcus asked, his voice hollow. He fought a wave of nausea. “What else happens in the video?”

  “Nothing. That’s it.”

  “No demands?”

  “Just the ME report,” Stetson said.

  “Christ.” Marcus laid his forehead in his hands. It felt cold, slicked with sweat. His throat felt dry. “He has others. Other hostages.”

  Stetson gave him a moment’s pause with a look on his face that nearly resembled something like empathy. But it lasted for only a brief second before he shook it off. Stetson’s cell phone chimed on his hip. He unclipped it from its plastic holster and read the message.

  “Shit.” Stetson sighed, putting his phone back into his belt. “The video was uploaded online. Thanks for coming down, but I’ve got to be going, assuming you don’t have any idea who the gunman is.”

  Marcus wasn’t listening. “Play the video back. When he takes the mask off the hostage. Let me see it again.”

  “What?”

  “Please. Just do it.”

  Stetson sat back down and replayed the video from the moment the gunman pulled the burlap mask from the hostage’s head. But this time, instead of centering on the gunman, Marcus focused entirely on the hostage. He leaned in closer to the computer screen, his nose nearly touching the image. He waited for the hostage’s face to change, for the hostage to shift into someone he had never seen before, for the sickness welling in his gut to dissolve. But none of this happened.

  “I know that man,” Marcus whispered. “The hostage. I interviewed him for the book.”

  “Who is he?” Stetson asked, straightening in his chair.

  Marcus could not look away from the screen. “His name is Walter Williams.”

  “Why did you interview him?” Stetson asked.

  “The Kingfisher saved his life.”

  2 SHALLOW FOOTPRINTS

  WREN LAY AWAKE AT FIVE in the morning, two hours before she had to leave for work. She was deliriously, out-of-body tired, but she couldn’t sleep due to a wave of rapturous shouts descending from overhead like water leaking through the floorboards.

  Her upstairs neighbor watched porn through a stack of amplifiers, or at least that was what it sounded like. A lot of porn. An unending chorus of moans roughly shaped into ecstatic obscenities. During the day, you could tune it out, relegate it to the background noise of the city. But in the rosy-fingered hours of dawn, with nothing but a box fan humming in the window, there was nowhere to hide from it.

  She used to pound on the ceiling with a broomstick in protest, but this didn’t do anything. It never did. In fact, she had never actually seen her upstairs neighbor, but that wasn’t a huge surprise. Wren only left the apartment to go to work at the bowling alley or go grocery shopping, and even then, she walked with her head down.

  When she pictured her upstairs neighbor watching porn, she imagined some bipedal Jabba the Hutt, his fleshy, greenish body splayed across a sunken couch. She often considered quickly hacking into his computer and torching his hard drive or at least turning down the volume of his speakers, but she knew she wouldn’t ever go through with it. He wasn’t hurting anyone.

  It was simply sad, not malicious.

  After she finally came to gr
ips with the fact that sleep was not coming for her anytime soon, she rolled off her egg-crate mattress and stumbled into the living room where she found Parker, her quasi-girlfriend—they had mutually agreed to eschew nominalizing their relationship—sitting cross-legged on their couch. Parker did Web design from home, which allowed her to work through the night and sleep at random points throughout the day. At this early hour, wide-eyed and focused, she glowed blue in the light of her laptop.

  Parker didn’t so much as look up at Wren shuffling past. Her head bobbed in rhythm to the music blasting through her headphones and spilling out into the room as one hand pulled mindlessly on one of her lip rings while the other ostensibly wrote a line of code. Wren noticed that Parker’s hair was different this morning. It was braided, dyed a dark shade of lavender. Yesterday it had been neon green. Every few days it was different, and every time a different Parker emerged from the bathroom drying her hair with a hand towel.

  Parker had offered, on more than one occasion, to dye Wren’s hair. Or, in Parker’s words, “give you an edge.” But Wren politely declined. She preferred to keep her hair the same dirty blond and cut it with a pair of kitchen scissors, just above the ears. It was easier to manage, which is to say she didn’t have to manage it at all.

  In the kitchen, Wren dug a stray granola bar from the back of the pantry.

  “Jesus Mary Miyazaki,” Parker said in the living room.

  Wren poked her head around the wall and saw Parker staring slack-jawed at her screen.

  Parker muttered, “Holy shit.”

  Wren detected in her voice a tremble that didn’t belong there. Not from her, at least.

  “What is it?” Wren asked.

  Parker didn’t answer.

  “What is it?” she said louder.

  “Get your laptop.”

  “Why?”

  “You need to get on the message boards right now.”

  Wren hurried back into her room and retrieved a laptop from her desk. She brought it with her into the living room and logged in to the message boards they had been using for the past two weeks. Lately, everyone was getting paranoid about sticking around on one server for too long, even if they were encrypted for members only. Their collective paranoia had a definite genesis. It had begun last year after the FBI brought down the group HydraLulz through spying on the group’s online communications. In response, the Liber-teens relocated their private message boards every couple weeks. And whatever data they left in their wake were shallow footprints in the snow, gone before you knew it.

  Wren scrolled through the most recent thread titled “Video.” There was rarely this much message board traffic among the Liber-teens at six in the morning.

  “I don’t see what people are talking about. A video? What’s going on?” Wren asked.

  “Hold on,” Parker muttered, her fingers clicking away at her keyboard. “I’m trying to get a working link. It keeps getting taken down.”

  Finally, someone else posted a working link to the video. Wren clicked and then watched, smiling in disbelief at the amateur clumsiness of the video—the labored breathing, the digitized voice, the awkward pauses, the way the polished gun made the man appear off-balanced in the frame. The constructed quality of it all. The man even wore a Liber-teen mask—a translucent likeness of Robespierre. She immediately thought it must be a joke, something in the vein of the nihilistic humor found in the dark corners of the internet, filmed by some kid looking to troll the Liber-teens or maybe fishing for an invitation to join.

  And then the gunshot.

  The blood and slump of body.

  There was nothing constructed about it. She could practically feel the bullet, a hot ember burrowing down into her brain.

  A feverish chill clawed beneath her skin.

  “Jesus,” she whispered.

  Parker didn’t look up from her computer. “So fucked up.”

  Wren went back to the busy thread and typed, Who made this? The words popped up alongside her handle, /MonsieurRamboz/.

  —It was just released on YouTube a few minutes ago.

  —Prepare for a fucking witch trial, everybody. You know they’ll blame us.

  —They?

  —Who the fuck is the Kingfisher?

  —Jesus Christ. Did you guys watch that video?

  —It isn’t real, right?

  —He said he has more hostages. We need to do something. We can get that ME report.

  —You seriously don’t know who the Kingfisher is?

  —They?

  —Anyone can order our Robespierre mask online.

  —The KF was some sort of superhero or whatever the hell.

  —This is going to be fucking anarchy.

  —We clearly had nothing to do with this.

  —No way in hell we could hack the CPD computer network. That’s a no way.

  —It can’t be real. You can tell by the pixilation. It’s a fake.

  —He wasn’t a superhero. He was a vigilante.

  —What’s the stream quality? Can someone run it through and get a count?

  —It’s not a fake.

  —You can tell by the pixilation.

  —Are you fucking kidding? We could totally hack their network.

  —What’s the difference between a vigilante and superhero?

  —That’s a fake video. I can tell.

  —Vigilantes die.

  Upstairs, the pornographic delirium reached a crescendo. Shouts, screams, intimating intense pain and pleasure, sustaining for what felt like whole minutes. With the ecstasy from overhead combined with the images from the video lingering in her mind, Wren felt more than a little sick, enough for the room to bend each time she blinked. She hoped that if she held her eyes closed long enough, the whole world might collapse into a dream.

  Wren’s phone began ringing. She jumped and clutched at her heart, as if holding it inside her chest against its will. It was only her alarm.

  “You have to work today?” Parker asked, though it sounded more like an accusation.

  “I work every day.”

  “You need to call in sick, then. You can’t go skipping off right now. Just call in sick.”

  “I already called in once this week.”

  “You work at a bowling alley,” Parker scoffed. “It’s not the fucking White House. They’ll be fine without you. We just got a fucking atomic bomb dropped on our fucking heads. We’ll be dealing with this all fucking day. The FBI is going to be on our asses like never before. And can you imagine all the shit this will get us on the forums?”

  Wren deferred her gaze and picked at a loose piece of carpet on the floor. “That’s what you’re worried about? Someone died in that video. And there were other hostages.”

  “What are we supposed to do about that?”

  “Are you serious right now?”

  “Yes I am. You’re thinking emotionally, not logically. We can’t do anything about those hostages. What we can do something about is the fact that this asshole with a gun is trying to blame us for this.”

  “We could try to find him.”

  “How do you propose we do that, Wren? I’d love to hear how exactly you think that is possible.”

  “I don’t know, but we could try. Or we could try to find the hostages. We could search missing persons databases. If we got a name, we could get a phone number, hack into the SS7 and get a location.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Why?”

  “This just happened. What are the chances the hostages are reported missing? Besides, do you really think those people have their phones on them? Whoever did this isn’t stupid, Wren.”

  Wren wasn’t sure it was hopeless, but she understood it was next-to-impossible. “Are you sure we’re not to blame for this?”

  Parker’s posture stiffened. “What are you trying to say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We didn’t do this, Wren.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You�
��re kidding, right?”

  “I’m just saying. We don’t know the other Liber-teens. Not personally, at least. We don’t know for a fact that a Liber-teen didn’t do this. We couldn’t know.”

  “Jesus. None of us did this. This isn’t what we do. You know that. Or at least I thought you did.”

  “But that guy is wearing our mask.”

  “That’s why we have to clear our name. You can order that mask online for fifteen dollars. It isn’t hard to get.”

  “You’re not listening to me,” Wren was surprised to hear her voice rising, even if it was slight. “Even if a Liber-teen didn’t do this, what if we inspired it? That hostage, the others—”

  “That’s not our problem,” Parker interrupted. “There’s no use in worrying about that. About them. Right now our problem is that pretty soon everyone is going to start blaming us for this because that asshole is wearing our mask. And I don’t need to explain to you why that is a major fucking problem. So just stick around while we figure it out. Please.”

  “I can’t. I have to catch the L for work. I’ll be back this afternoon.”

  “Jesus.” Parker shook her head and reabsorbed herself in her computer screen, picking at her lip ring. “Look, I know you think I’m being insensitive or something. And maybe I am. But we can’t do anything to help those hostages, Wren. That’s the reality of the situation.”

  Wren chewed her fingernail, which was already waning to her cuticle. “We could analyze the video. We could try to match descriptions from the missing persons database.” She regarded Parker’s doubting smile. “I know it’s a long shot, but we could do it.”

  “Disregarding the ‘long shot’ quality of that plan, it would require time we don’t have, Wren. You know as well as I do that the FBI is probably already focusing all of their attention on us right now because of this. If we get arrested because of this shit, who will be left to watch over the systems of power that landed us in this fucking mess? You know I’m right. And you need to be here to help us dig our way out of this hole.”