Deeper

by Jeff Long

  “The horse is wild,” said Gregorio. “It needs the right rider.”

  “I don’t ride horses,” she said.

  “But we can save the children…”

  Without warning the window shattered behind them.

  They looked as a rock rolled across the floor and stopped. They watched it, almost academically, as if a small meteor had just landed at their feet. Then angry shouts piped through the hole in the glass.

  Li picked up the rock. “Hmm,” he said.

  Ali took it from him. “Son of a bitch,” she muttered.

  “Now do you see?” said Gregorio. “What did I tell you? The dogs think we are weak. It makes them bolder.” He grabbed the rock from her hand, ready to throw it back at the protesters.

  “Get away from the window, Gregorio.” Ali heard more glass breaking, more rocks pattering against the outside walls. It sounded like the front edge of a hailstorm.

  “I’ll call the police,” Li said.

  “How many times have we called the police?” said Gregorio. “They come too late, if they come at all. What do they care about us?”

  “Call them,” Ali said. She headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?” Gregorio said.

  “I’m going to have a little talk with them.”

  “You’re going out there?” He recovered. “No, you’re not.”

  “They’ll go home. I’ve done this before.”

  “They were always schoolchildren and housewives before,” said Gregorio. “This is different tonight. They’re throwing rocks.”

  “They’ll stop.”

  “Listen to me, Alexandra. Rocks. They hate you.”

  “But this is my country, too,” she said. It sounded so naive.

  Gregorio went into macho mode. “You stay here. I will go.” He even gave his chest a thump.

  “Gregorio,” she said. “Let me handle this. And, John, call the police.”

  The stairs creaked as she descended. Ali brushed her hair back. She tucked in her blouse with its bright sunflowers, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

  Right away she realized this was not a protest like the others. This was a mob. The only things missing were pitchforks, torches, and a rope. Just minutes ago, there had been a few dozen of them at most. Now the street was filled with them.

  The stone throwers stopped. “There she is.” The angry faces merged into one.

  Ali almost slammed the door shut against them. Instead she forced herself to step outside. The shouts died.

  Who were the ringleaders? That was important. Would it be better to invite them in? Or should she confront the whole lot of them? Reason with them? Shame them? She tried to remember what worked in the movies. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said. Ah, she thought to herself, the nun treatment.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” The voice came from their midst.

  “Studying maps,” she said. “Going through the relics, searching for clues. Clues,” she quickly added, “about where the children are being taken.”

  “We know where they’re going,” the voice said. “Down to the city. Your city. The city you keep protecting.” The man’s voice was shrill and full of broken edges.

  Ali searched for the owner of that voice, but it was a sea of scowls out there. “The city is dead,” she said. “We killed it ten years ago. I was there near the end.”

  “I was there,” that wounded voice said. “And it is not dead.”

  This time the crowd parted. A figure shuffled forward, barefoot and shirtless. A pauper, thought Ali. Some homeless oddball clowning for attention. Then he stepped into the light.

  Like her, he was a former captive. Ali saw it right away. But she had never met this man.

  Recaps, or recaptureds, formed a strange, twilight family. They straddled two worlds, that of the surface and that of the deeps, fitting into neither. Ali saw more of them than most people did because so many of them sought her out. They came here looking for answers, drawn by the artifacts, or simply to know there were others like them.

  But she had never seen a recap more savaged than this. The hadals had cut his earlobes into fringe, and sliced away his eyelids and nose. He was hunched from a spinal injury, and covered with hadal markings and brandings. His toes were missing. His fingers were twisted.

  “You don’t recognize me, Sister?”

  “No,” she said. He was not one you forgot.

  He was coated with serpentine ridges of scar. It was almost beautiful, that unbroken arabesque. They had turned him into a walking canvas, with symbols and abstract animal shapes and geometric designs inked into his skin. She caught herself searching for an aleph among his tattoos.

  “It was seven years ago,” he said. “I came here. Right here. Into this building. Into your office right up there.”

  “Clemens?” said Ali. This creature was that man? “The filmmaker?”

  “See, you do remember,” he said. “I asked you for help. You turned me away. Forget the city, you said. But I found it. Without you. Then they found me.”

  Which begged the question, Why had they spared him?

  As if reading her mind, Clemens said, “They kept me for quite a long while. It seemed like forever. Then they sent me up with a message.”

  “What message?” she asked.

  “I am the message,” he said. He turned to the men with their lowered caps and do-rags and hunched collars. Those tight faces—white, brown, black—brimmed with rage. Such hate, thought Ali. Where did it come from? She prayed that John’s call had gone through to the police.

  “I am the children,” Clemens said to them. “This”—and he spread his arms wide so that the whole world could see his disfigurement—“this is what’s waiting for the children, those who last the journey. Look at me. Here’s what they do. In the dark it’s hard to know what’s coming. The knives. The needles. Like insects. You heal from one thing, and they start in with the next. They fed me one of my own testicles. I didn’t know, in the dark, just food. And I was hungry.”

  The mob stood silent and appalled. And rapt. Ali noticed that. Devoted almost. Because they needed Clemens and his bitterness and venom to take them to the next level. Gregorio was right. These were no schoolchildren.

  “And the raping.” Clemens pointed at Ali. “Like animals raping you. Strong, my God. Even when I was healing. All the time, at you.” He turned to the mob. “What they did to me, they will do to your sons and daughters.”

  He went on with the horrors. The details rippled back through the crowd, and their outrage rippled forward. He kept pointing at Ali, as if she were responsible for all the wickedness in the world and all the pain he had suffered. It terrified her.

  Pressed against the door, she felt the Studio at her back, and it had never seemed so fragile. Her precious archives, her relics and captive accounts and settler memoirs and photographs and maps and all the rest, the whole vision she’d built as a way for mankind to understand its roots, everything was at risk.

  “I am sorry,” she said, interrupting Clemens. The crowd quieted. “You have suffered. You are still suffering.”

  “Is that pity you’re offering, Sister?” Clemens said. “Soup and a few crumbs of bread for the lost souls?”

  She looked beyond him, at the crowd. She gestured at the Studio’s facade. As high as people could reach there were snapshots of the missing children. Yellow ribbons wrapped the light pole. Flowers and teddy bears lay heaped along the sidewalk. Her staff had dubbed it the Wailing Wall.

  “Here are the children,” she said. “Everyone wants them to come home safely. The search is taking longer than anyone wants. It needs time and patience.”

  “Time and patience.” Clemens hooted it. “The children are sinking deeper by the minute and day. Meanwhile you guard the city like it was your child.”

  “What are you talking about?” she said.

  “You refused me your maps to that evil place. Now you hide the devils in your drawers an
d cabinets. You keep your secrets in there.”

  “What secrets?” she said. “You said you know where the city is. Go to it then. Lead your army. Have your war.” Just take this mob away from here.

  “But first we need your blessing, Sister.”

  Smiles lit up beneath the ball caps and angry brows.

  “Mr. Clemens.” Ali drew herself up. Compassion wasn’t working. “There is no other way to put this. I don’t mean to be cruel. But it’s clear that your experience damaged more than just your body.”

  For a minute it seemed she had won. The crush of faces shifted its stare from her to him, and saw what she saw, a broken soul, plain and simple. She heard men grumbling.

  But then someone called out, “What’s that?” Arms raised. Fingers pointed.

  “It’s one of them.”

  Ali twisted to see. Three stories up, John Li was peeking out the window. Backlit by the eerie UV light, his horns and deformities leaped at them. His Asian eyes didn’t help matters. China was fast gaining on Haddie as the Other.

  “Christ, she’s got one living in there.”

  Then the rocks were flying again. Shards of glass splashed on the sidewalk. Ali reached for the door.

  Her panic triggered them. She couldn’t believe how quickly it unfolded. They swallowed her in a rush. Hands. Eyes. Curses.

  It was a warm night. Their armpits were wet, their foreheads slick. Someone punched her. She quit fighting.

  The anthropologist in her was fascinated by how quickly the mob arranged itself. It was an amorphous thing, brainless really, a big blob. She couldn’t move. It clutched her.

  Where the fire came from, she wasn’t sure. Abruptly the windows were vomiting flames.

  Probably the men didn’t mean to pummel and maul her, but it happened. Elbows knocked against her skull. Their noise deafened her. Someone threw a fist, and she doubled over, almost sick. They picked her up and carried her along.

  In a blur, she saw the brick wall with its fluttering snapshots of children. Some had caught on fire. Overhead, through the forest of thrashing limbs, the window with John was empty.

  She was their monster. This was her den.

  Flames bellowed from the door and lower windows. Rocks bounced from the walls, raining down from the smoke. Ten years of work, she despaired. She had been doing nothing but gathering fuel for a bonfire. Sirens screamed in the far distance.

  The Studio moved away from her. Its bright flames faded. The mob was in motion, jostling down the dark street, taking her with them. Her feet didn’t touch the ground. It had been like this when the hadals captured her, getting dragged into the darkness, going blind.

  “What are you doing?” she kept saying.

  Their sweat splashed her cheeks and wet her lips. Something hard hit her head. The shock of it traveled down the bones of her neck.

  “Bitch.” A glint of feral eyes up there. And the stars. Just like in the cartoons. Everything went black.

  Ali surfaced in a light drizzle.

  The air tasted sweet and clean. She’d made it through the violence. For a minute, while she labored to open her eyes, Ali was back in her past, waking to that quiet island jungle where she and Ike had surfaced from the abyss. He was holding her. “Ike,” she whispered.

  She opened her eyes. It was night and Gregorio was rocking her in his arms. The asphalt was hard and wet. Her ears were ringing. She wiped blood from her eyes.

  “Ali,” whispered Gregorio. He was bleeding from the nose. He held her tight. They were penned in among pillars. Legs, she realized. The mob.

  Ali tried to sit up. Now she heard the cheers and jeers. It sounded almost like a baseball game. “The Studio,” she said.

  “It’s gone,” he said into her ear. His ferocity had vanished.

  “Never mind,” she said. They would just have to start from scratch. Then she remembered Li. “Where is John?”

  “Be still, Alexandra.” His meekness terrified her.

  “What are they doing?”

  “It’s almost over,” he said.

  “What?”

  A piece of copper pipe prodded her from above. “Shut up there.”

  A man’s scream rose above the din. He whinnied in a rising crescendo, then broke into a long howl.

  “Look at that,” a man said.

  “Awesome.”

  Water gurgled into a storm drain near her arm. Instinctively Ali pulled her hand away from the dark opening. There was laughter. Someone shouted, “I feel your pain, man.”

  “Is that John?” she whispered. “What are they doing to him?”

  Gregorio didn’t answer. He just rocked her like a baby.

  A beam of light splashed through their ranks. It cut through the sky and lit the raindrops silver. Their anonymous faces jumped to living color. They flinched. Hands clawed it away, shielding their eyes. The light waved back and forth. They resented it. “Who the fuck?”

  Everyone twisted to see. Was it the police? The National Guard? Ali tried to stand. A man shoved her down again. People started booing. Their legs shifted and bumped against Ali.

  The light mowed through their darkness.

  There was an electronic click and a squeal, and a speaker came to life. A woman’s warm, husky voice blossomed in the rain. “Citizens,” it said. “Patriots. Soldiers of God.” The mob fell silent. “My name is Rebecca Coltrane.”

  It was surreal, like a dream. Ali tried to take it in. Patriots? Soldiers of God? And what on earth was Rebecca doing here?

  Ali got to her feet. This time no one shoved her back down to the street. She craned to see over the shoulders and backs of the crowd. The light—a spotlight mounted on a pickup truck—cut left and right. The light never quit moving. It prowled among them. It spoiled their dark urges.

  The truck stopped not far away. The cab was draped with an American flag. Rebecca was standing in the back. Ali barely recognized her.

  This was a different Rebecca from the despairing mother who had drunk tea in Ali’s office four weeks ago. This woman had steel in her now. She looked like a stone-and-metal angel. Her long hair was cropped short. It glistened like gold. Her skin was alabaster. Her soaked white blouse clung to her breasts. Another time, another place, it might have been erotic. Tonight she was untouchable.

  “I came here,” she said, and Ali felt the men physically straighten themselves. “I came to see your power. I came to see your fire. I came to feel your rage.”

  What was Rebecca doing here? Why was she speaking to these lawless men?

  “Bring me that man,” Rebecca said, pointing at a telephone pole.

  Now Ali saw the body lashed to a telephone pole. At first she did not recognize him. They had burned him in long stripes. Bone showed. A blowtorch, she realized.

  “John?” she said. Men glanced at her. Those nearest edged away. The man with the copper pipe dropped it.

  Ali started toward the truck, but Gregorio caught her arm. “Be quiet,” he whispered.

  After a minute, hands lifted the limp body to the bed of the truck. Rebecca took the body. Li looked dead cradled in his arms. No one said anything. Would she drive away now, or scold them, or give John back to them? And why were they so obedient to her?

  Rebecca stood again. She left Li slumped at her feet. “You are the children’s salvation,” she said into her microphone.

  This was Rebecca’s crusade. Ali got it. She had read about a home-grown militia and passed it off as a harmless parade.

  “I need you,” said Rebecca. “The children need you. Everyone else has given up on them. Tomorrow we head for Guam. Together we will descend into the wilderness and hunt the devil down and free the children. Lord God,” she said, and turned her head up into the rain. “Deliver us from evil.”

  Men murmured, “Amen.”

  “It all begins tomorrow,” Rebecca went on. “Tonight you need your rest. This is a distraction. It saps our strength. It makes us weaker and smaller. Our calling is down below. Tomorrow will be our da
y. Now go back to your beds. Rest. Eat. Call your loved ones. Tomorrow everything begins.”

  The crowd began melting away. Ali could see the twinkle of fire engine lights and the orange glow of flames and smoke. The Studio had collapsed into itself. In a way, it freed her. She had no ties to anything now. She could start fresh.

  As the crowd dispersed, Ali went to the pickup truck. It was brand-new, with dealer plates, a loaner. Rebecca was kneeling beside Li. He was naked and unconscious. The burn marks were deep. Someone had taken a rock to his horn stubs.

  “John?” said Ali.

  His eyes rolled.

  “We have to get him to a hospital,” Ali said.

  “Take him,” Rebecca said. She handed a cell phone to Gregorio. “Take this. Call an ambulance.”

  “You’re leaving?” Ali said.

  “I’ve got to follow them.”

  “Those men belong to you?”

  For a moment, the warrior queen gave way to that weary, helpless woman who had sat in Ali’s office. “Believe me,” she said. It was close to a whisper. “I had no idea it would be like this.”

  It was not an apology. There was shock in her voice, but also awe.

  “Rebecca,” said Ali. “Before it’s too late, what are you doing?”

  The frightened green eyes recovered their steel. Ali could practically see her strapping on her armor again. “Yes, before it’s too late,” said Rebecca. “I keep telling you, but no one will listen. Whatever it takes, with or without your help, if it’s the last thing I do on earth, my daughter is coming back. I am going to find my child and take her out from hell.”

  ARTIFACTS

  HOMELAND SECURITY

  In the Event of Subterranean Attack

  Go outside immediately. Get as far aboveground as possible.

  Do not go into your basement. Avoid underground spaces, including elevator shafts, staircases, subways, mines, caves, and underground drainage or highway tunnel systems. If caught inside, locate to higher floors of the house or structure.

  Turn on every light source available. This includes indoor and outdoor house lights, car headlights, flashlights, even gas logs and barbecues, Fourth of July sparklers, etc.