Marked

by S. Andrew Swann

  It took me a few moments before I could answer him. “I think I’m okay.”

  “Are you sure? You don’t look good. Should we go to an emergency room?”

  “No.” I unclenched my hands from the dashboard. The sensation along the Mark was already fading, and the pounding of my heart was returning to normal.

  The car was stopped by the curb now. He put it in park and turned to me, then reached out and placed a hand on my shoulder. I felt the pressure of his thumb against a swirl of the Mark through the fabric of my blouse. I thought the touch should freak me out, but after what I had just felt, it was reassuring. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  I looked away, because I couldn’t tell him the truth. Not the whole truth, anyway. “I think I just had a panic attack.”

  “I think I know what this is.”

  For a brief fearful moment I thought he really might know, even though there was no real way he could. “What?”

  “You never took any time off when your mom died.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You’ve been pushing yourself nonstop. You haven’t taken time to breathe, much less grieve.”

  “I . . .” I trailed off. He had planted the seed, and now I wondered if my mental state could be manifesting in how I perceived my Mark. “I’m fine now, really.” I tried to give him a confident smile, even though I felt like a wreck inside.

  Whether or not he was right about the panic attack, he was right about one thing. I hadn’t stopped to grieve.

  Jacob let go of my shoulder and drove the car back onto the road. He glanced over at me and said, “If you need anything . . .”

  “I’m fine now,” I said, as if repetition could make it true.

  * * *

  —

  OF course, it wasn’t true.

  Periodically, the Mark continued to give me these new sensations, and I was able to keep from reacting as severely to them. Tied up with it was the grief I was avoiding. Every day, something would hit me, and it would sink in that my family was gone. I’d feel a crushing loneliness that brought silent tears and almost made me reach for Jacob.

  But it stayed “almost.”

  On top of everything else I felt, the seemingly random reactions of the Mark reminded me how little I actually knew about it—where it came from, what it was. If my mental state could suddenly start causing it to behave differently without any warning, my entire life was less stable than I had thought it was.

  It took a few more days for me to nerve up and test that I still had some sort of control. Late evening, in the confines of my own townhouse, I pushed myself through layers of time just to reassure myself that, despite the new sensations, the Mark behaved as it always had. I still felt its fingers push me through different worlds, the same invisible companion touching me.

  But in the world where my house was empty of any occupants, I felt the strange new sensation again, more intensely and more obviously different than the familiar touch of my Mark. It was a shock, like having a stranger walk in on something very private. I ran from it, pushing my way home and locking myself in my bedroom as if someone had been chasing me.

  The Mark felt a part of me, but this was something else. It was as if a stranger was groping for me, their hands not quite touching my body.

  That night I didn’t sleep.

  * * *

  —

  OF course, Whedon eventually asked for a ride-along.

  It was the longest day of my police career, riding along with the Justice Department lawyer in the back seat, on my third day with barely two hours’ sleep. To say I wasn’t at my best was an understatement. Every question she’d ask, however innocuous, sounded like a potential accusation.

  Ridiculously enough, the worst episode was when she asked about my car. I had driven some Charger police squads when I was just starting out as a cop, and I had fallen in love with the vehicle. Three years ago, to celebrate making detective, I had bought my own Charger SRT8, with a 425 horsepower 6.1-liter Hemi. With custom rims and paint job, it ran over forty thousand dollars. I had paid cash.

  When she asked, perhaps reasonably, how a cop on my salary could buy something like that for cash, I snapped a little.

  “What are you trying to say?” My voice was brittle and too loud.

  “It’s just unusual—” she said.

  “So fucking what?”

  “Dana?” Jacob sounded startled at my outburst. “Maybe you should—”

  “Should what?” I glared over my shoulder at the woman in the back seat. “I know. I should cooperate. You know what, I’ve been cooperating. And you know what? This little bitch is so disappointed that she hasn’t found something wrong in the department that she’s decided to dig into my personal life.”

  “I think you should calm down, Detective Rohan.”

  “Why?” I snapped. “I gave my life to this job. My reward is to get questioned because I do it too well? I should sit back and take it? I should just lie back and say, sure you can look all over my bank accounts and taxes and investments over the past five years—hell, the past ten years—just so I can prove to you I earned that fucking car?”

  “Detective Rohan, I think you’re out of line.”

  “I’m not the only one,” I said. I turned around and sank back into the passenger seat.

  * * *

  —

  THE sad thing was I had chosen to blow up about something that was completely defensible. Even with a subpoena and an auditor, no one would find anything untoward about my finances, no income streams that lacked explanation. I had never used my Mark to steal, even though it would have been laughably easy to do it.

  I just used my abilities to pick good investments. A newspaper from next week was more valuable than a key to a jewelry store, even if it wasn’t 100% accurate after said week came and went. The futures from which I got information were close enough that it wasn’t a problem to multiply my cop’s salary to afford my car and my townhouse. I had the capital gains taxes to prove it.

  The car was really my only indulgence, and when Whedon questioned it, it felt as if she was questioning my identity. In a sense, she was. My car certainly received more attention from me than the sterile place I supposedly made my home. I think I’d spent more time picking out the after-market stereo in my car than I had all the furniture on my first floor combined.

  When I got into my midnight-blue Charger, I settled more comfortably into the driver’s seat than I sat in the chair in my living room. I told myself that it was all a bunch of psychoanalytical bullshit. I was stressed. I was tired. I was still trying to grieve. The woman had just gotten on my last nerve.

  I didn’t play any music and drove home to the rumble of the 6.1-liter Hemi. I shouldn’t have to justify myself. It was Whedon who was turning her investigation into a fishing expedition. I just wished Jacob hadn’t been present. I just wished—

  The Mark hit me then, and it was a measure of my self-control that I didn’t slam the Charger to a screeching halt. I slowed gently and pulled over to the curb before shifting into park. My arms had broken into gooseflesh as the sensation of strange hands almost touching me ran up and down the length of my back.

  I looked behind me, briefly convinced that I had been chauffeuring a cliché serial killer in the back seat and he was about to grab my neck. Of course, there wasn’t anyone hiding behind me. I stared into the empty back seat, then glanced up to look out the rear window at the empty street behind me. The sun had gone down, the sky had purpled to a point between dusk and full night, and the streetlights were just now coming on. It was far enough past rush hour that the street was empty of traffic.

  Despite the weird feelings from my Mark, I scolded myself for being paranoid. Whatever the sensations meant, I had been having them off and on for a few days and there had been no sign that the unfamiliar almost-to
uch was connected to anything outside my own screwed-up mind. I sighed and turned around.

  A face appeared at my driver’s side window. The only reason I didn’t scream out in surprise was because my body had decided to stop breathing at exactly the same time. The only noise that came from me was a long, ragged wheeze, as if someone had kicked me hard in the gut.

  He had to be homeless. He was cadaverously thin, and his hair was a shoulder-length halo of tangled gray that wrapped his face so that it was impossible to determine where the hair ended and the beard began. His eyes were sunken, so in the glare from the streetlight his face was nearly a skull. It would have been generous to call his clothes rags.

  He was pale enough to be a ghost, but he clearly wasn’t, since he stood close enough to the door for his breath to fog the window.

  My hand reached for the door lock even though it was already locked. I stopped and placed my hand on the door handle. I sucked in a breath, composing myself even as my Mark decided to bring another unfamiliar hand to almost touch me.

  I looked into the old man’s face and asked in reasonable cop-to-unhinged-civilian tones, “Can I help you, sir?”

  He responded by slapping both his hands on the window so hard that I feared the glass might break. Then he started screaming things in a language that wasn’t English, spraying flecks of saliva across the window.

  I leaned back as he screamed, the closed window a poor protector of my personal space. He seemed completely insane and could have been babbling complete gibberish. I couldn’t even guess what language it was, if it was any language. But the more he railed, the more it felt familiar, the more it felt as if I should understand him.

  For a moment, I thought I did. A phrase crossed his lips, and I was certain I knew the meaning behind it.

  “Wealcan has fallen! They’ll come for you! The shadows are coming!”

  My eyes widened, and I said to the man, “Please, sir, calm down.”

  He shook his head and redoubled his babbling, so I lost the thread connecting meaning to his words. He was so distressed, he could have been speaking English and have been just as unintelligible. He was pounding on the window with his fists now. He wanted in, and every rational impulse said: bad idea. A homeless schizophrenic was having a psychotic break in front of me, and despite the tantalizing thought that I might have understood part of what he had said, I was keeping a barrier between me and him.

  I had just pulled out my cell phone to call 911, when he abruptly shut up and stopped pounding the window. He turned toward the front of the car, and the shadows moved on his face as he raised his head. I could see his eyes then, colored a blue so light they were almost gray. I saw the last of the violent emotion drain from them—I still couldn’t tell if it had been anger or panic—leaving a quiet melancholy in its wake.

  There was something familiar in those eyes I had never seen before. And in the deepest part of my soul I felt I needed to know this man, understand who he was, what he meant. I needed to know why his tragically sad gaze was familiar, and why I could understand some of what he said when I knew no language other than English.

  I opened the door before I saw what he was looking at. It was a mistake. The sudden feeling that I knew this man, or that I should know this man, had overwhelmed my situational awareness. He was walking toward the front of the car as I stepped out and said, “Sir? Please. Wait. Who are you?”

  I stood next to the door and realized that things were seriously wrong. My Mark ached with two unfamiliar presences, one of which—I now thought—was old, strong, and bore a strange familiarity. Something in my thoughts that split-second associated that sensation with the old man standing with his back to me. The other one was cold, slow, and heavy. Alien. Coming closer . . .

  There was something approaching us from down the street, a lumbering shadow between the pools of light cast by the streetlights. It was man-shaped, but larger, with thicker limbs. When it stepped into the light, I first thought I was seeing someone dressed in some sort of medieval plate mail, down to the long sword he carried in his right hand.

  But as the armor moved, and streetlights reflected off the etched steel and polished brass, I heard more than just the clanking of padded metal armor. I heard the clicking of gears and the whine of some sort of engine. In the joints I saw hoses and mechanical bits that did not belong in old plate mail. Along the segmented plates of armor, I could see screws and bolts.

  This armor came from a machine shop, not a blacksmiths’.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  In front of me, I heard the old man utter a syllable whose meaning was completely clear to me.

  “No.”

  I was already back in cop mode, I edged out from behind the civilian as I brought out the Jericho. I held the weapon down and ready, trigger finger along the barrel as I called out, “You, in the armor! I’m the police. You need to drop the weapon and stop moving, now!”

  Its mechanical approach didn’t stop, and for a moment I wondered if there was actually a human being inside. My gun rose a bit, the barrel aimed more or less between the armor’s knees and groin. The figure was still ten yards away and moving slowly, so my finger didn’t wrap the trigger just yet. “Stop moving and drop the weapon!”

  It hesitated and slowly turned its helmet in my direction. I realized that its focus had been completely on the old man. As the helmet moved, I saw the streetlight shine into slits in the face and I caught what might have been the glint of a human eye. I raised my voice, both to impress the life-and-death seriousness of the situation, and because the dude inside the armor could not have the best hearing wrapped up in a cocoon of clanking and hissing metal.

  “Now! Put the sword on the ground and step away from—”

  I hadn’t forgotten about the old man, I had made a point of moving laterally toward the center of the street to keep him out of the potential line of fire. I kept him in my peripheral awareness as I focused on the main threat, but I was one person, and I had no warning that he might be as potentially dangerous as the guy with the sword. I caught his movement out of the corner of my eye, running toward the armor.

  I had a split-second to act, but my only two options were shoot, or not to shoot. The old man had armed himself with a chunk of asphalt from the side of the road and was raising it up.

  If the guy had come at me, or had a more effective weapon, or headed toward a guy who wasn’t wrapped in metal armor, I would have shot. As it was, the futility of the attack was obvious even in the moment I had to react.

  “Stop moving!” I yelled at him, suspecting he didn’t understand my words. “Stop and drop the—”

  The air resonated with a massive clang as the old man brought the black chunk of asphalt down on the armor, striking the joint between the helmet and the left shoulder. My gun rose, and my finger found the trigger as the armored guy responded with a swing impossibly fast for something that looked so heavy.

  The long sword caught the old man across the midsection so hard that the man’s feet left the ground. I fired at the armor’s center of mass, the gunshot deafening. A spark of a ricochet bloomed in the right side of the armor’s torso, under the sword arm that was still swinging.

  The old man fell to the ground, slamming into a light pole. The sword glistened red now.

  I fired again, and another spark bloomed on the lower half of the armor’s breastplate.

  Damn hollow-points! They were SOP for police firearms because the bullet fragmented on impact, throwing all the force into the target. Not only did it stop the guy you were shooting at a lot more effectively, but there’s no blow through the body where the bullet keeps going and kills some bystander fifty feet away.

  Problem was, they’re crap against body armor—and with what this dude was wearing, I was going to have a problem.

  He moved toward the old man, and I took the dangerous step of aiming at the helm
et where I had a better chance of doing some damage.

  Another step and the man in the armor disappeared.

  He didn’t slip into shadow, or run, or hide behind something. He moved forward and ceased to exist. And when the man—armor, bloody sword, and all—vanished from under the center of a streetlight’s glare, I felt something that I could almost call an alien inverse of what I felt when the Mark pushed me through time.

  Did he just do what I . . .

  I ran to the old man, holstering the gun and pulling my cell phone back out. He was crumpled, unconscious at the base of a streetlight. His lower body was already scarlet, and he lay in a dark pool that was spreading underneath him. I had some thought of trying to render first aid, but the wound was the width of his abdomen, and I could see viscera already pushing out.

  Still, I tried to help him as I gave directions to the 911 operator. While I did what I could to keep the man’s insides inside, I realized the odd sensations from my Mark were fading away. I was not shocked when the paramedics showed up and told me that the old man was beyond help, and there wasn’t anything I could have done.

  I wasn’t even shocked when they lifted his corpse onto the gurney and, under the ragged shirt and smears of blood, I saw the swirling pattern of another Mark across the old man’s back.

  SIX

  I DID NOT permit myself to react for at least an hour after the event. I tried to keep myself under some semblance of control as the paramedics took the old man’s corpse. And when the cops questioned me, I told as much of the truth I thought I could get away with. I was so sick of deception that I probably told them way more than I should have.

  I described the killer, some nut with a long sword and armor, and I added that it was “possibly home-made” so that I didn’t sound completely crazy. I gave them a more-or-less accurate blow-by-blow of what happened, including the two shots I fired. When they asked me what I hit, I told them I’d probably missed the shot. Again, to make the story sound more plausible. Also, no disappearing. In my statement, the suspect ran off while I chose to try and render first aid to the victim.