by Amanda Cyr
“Didn’t you just have one?” I asked.
Val didn’t reply. He lit the stick of nicotine and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger idly. Tibbs handed me a crate, and I set with the others, next to Val. I brought over three more crates before I realized he was deliberately ignoring me.
“What?” I asked, dropping a crate next to him with more force than necessary.
Val cut his eyes to me, then back to the ceiling. He took a drag from his cigarette, flicked his tongue over his teeth, and said in a curt tone, “You provoked him.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I laughed dryly and went back to the truck. Was Val honestly mad that I’d defended him? By the time I returned with another crate, I’d pulled my thoughts together.
“I stood up to him,” I said. “For you, nonetheless.”
“You deliberately started a fight.”
I shook my head and looked him in the face, even if Val refused to meet my eyes. “Right, so you don’t want to stand up for yourself, and you don’t want anyone else doing it either. Good to know. You’re a very proud man.”
Val brought the cigarette back to his lips. The fingers resting on the crate began to tap as they so often did. I made it halfway to the truck, listening all the while to the tapping fingers, before I felt something inside me snap.
“It’s funny,” I said, whipping around and walking back toward him. “You’re fighting to help a city filled with people who are afraid to stand up for themselves, and all the while, you’re just as bad as they are.”
That definitely got under his skin. Val was on his feet in an instant, eyes sharp and narrowed on mine. Tibbs jumped out of the truck and rushed to step between us. “Oy, one fight is enough for today.”
“Don’t worry, Tibbs,” I said. “We both know he won’t do anything about it.”
Tibbs was like me. He didn’t expect Val to lunge over his arm and sock me in the face. I staggered back against the truck with a hand pressed over my stinging cheek. Stunned by the attack, I stared up at Val. He looked angry, but the expression didn’t last long. He snickered. I chuckled. He laughed.
“I don’t get what’s funny about this,” Tibbs said.
Truthfully, I didn’t either. Maybe it was the dumbstruck look on my face, or how Val was trying to discreetly shake the pain out of the hand he hit me with. I doubted Val even understood it.
Val calmed down and ran a hand across his face, lingering to rub his tired eyes. “You’re an ass.” He sighed through a small smile.
When I opened my mouth to offer a witty reply, I was robbed of the words. A gunshot ripped through the air around us, an all too familiar sound followed by an equally familiar sensation. The puncture of skin, the shred of muscles, and the burning, unrivaled agony of a bullet. My hands clamped tight over my torso. Blood soaked through my shirt and seeped hotly between my fingers. I grunted an incomprehensible slur of words as I stumbled forward.
Val’s cigarette fell from his mouth, and he shoved past Tibbs to help me to my knees. “Shit! Shitshitshit! Nik, hey, can you hear me?” He pressed his hands over mine to keep pressure on the wound, even as he continued to swear loudly.
Over Val’s shoulder, I saw a horde of Grey Men marching down the street toward us in perfect unison. Like robotic drones, they lifted their weapons together to fire. “Grey Men!” Tibbs yelled with his hands cupped over his mouth, calling out to warn the others, even when I already feared it was too late.
Interrogation Block 02, Eisenhower Building—Washington, D.C.
Wednesday, November 25th, 2076—4:35 p.m.
o, just for clarification sake, at this point in your story, you’ve killed three Grey Men and four of Governor Granne’s personal guards?” Dr. Halliburton asked with a small edge to her voice, suggesting it wasn’t a question as much as an accusation. “Seven, individual deaths which you are not being held accountable for, due to the fact you were still maintaining contact with the Y.I.D. at the time.”
“You don’t have the right to talk to me about being held accountable for deaths,” I replied coldly. Since the doctor pinned The Council sigil to her lapel, any regard for verbal restraint went out the window.
She clacked her nails against the side of her tablet, lips pulling into a thin smile. “Careful there, Mr. Zhukov. I have the authority to add blasphemy to your long list of offenses.”
“Go right ahead.”
Dr. Halliburton waited a moment longer to see if I would change my mind. I stared straight at her, imagining all the ways I’d like to make her pay. Her nails, clacking on the tablet… I’d rip them off one by one until she gave the names and locations of other members of The Council. And then, once I had the information I wanted, I’d—
The phone between us rang. I saw the name “Howard” flash on the screen before Dr. Halliburton could snatch it. My tongue swept over the roof of my mouth, scratchy and dry. Images of Val flashed through my mind at light speed. His cold hands shaking as he tied his scarf around my middle. Fleeing through the Oxford District with Grey Men at our heels. The intimate, befuddling seconds following the moment I decided we could never see each other again.
“Yes?”
Dr. Halliburton’s impatient answer yanked me back into the cold, interrogation block. I watched her face as it softened into a look of confusion. My first thought was that Val had somehow escaped. I ought to have known better than to think like a hopeful fool, because the elation prematurely surging through my veins turned to ice with the doctor’s next words.
“Well, is it bad? No, there’s no need. He brought it on himself.” She sighed.
“What happened?” I demanded.
Dr. Halliburton brought a finger to her lips, scowling like I was rude to be talking while she was on the phone. I opened my mouth to speak again, but one of the Grey Men clasped a hand over it to keep me quiet. I bit down as hard as I could. The rough skin on the Grey Man’s palm tore and the metallic taste of blood coated my mouth.
Over the giant’s pained holler, I barely heard Dr. Halliburton say, “Thank you for the update, Howard. Keep me posted.”
She hung up, set the phone aside, and watched me writhing against the Grey Man’s restraint for a moment before she said, “Seems your boyfriend tried to escape. Gave poor Howard some trouble and got himself hurt in the process.”
Tried? Hurt? What did that mean?
“Don’t worry. He didn’t get far,” she continued. “Caused quite a stir on the fifth floor.”
The fifth floor wasn’t just where serious threats were kept; that was just one, small section behind a vault-like door at the end of the hall. The fifth floor was also where all the offices of military elites were located. My mind put together the worst case scenario before the doctor said it out loud.
“Your father was nice enough to… subdue him.”
A knot coiled in my gut. The muscles in my jaw went slack, and a chilling numbness crept all the way into my toes. Val was dead. A mere five stories above me, Val was dead. Gunned down by my father and lying, body still warm, in his own blood.
I gagged, stomach turning over. The Grey Man pulled his hand away as I doubled over and heaved. Had I actually eaten anything in the last three days, I’d have thrown it all up; instead my body felt like it was trying to turn itself inside out. Ribs bent and stitches strained, but the physical pain wasn’t what made me cry out. My outburst faded with my energy. I was weak. Empty.
The doctor’s voice, accompanied by a quiet chuckle, pierced the fog I was drowning in. “Oh, I’m sorry. I should have clarified what I meant by ‘subdued’.”
Another trick. Another mind game. Pounding heart echoed in throbbing head and muffled out Dr. Halliburton’s airy explanation of how Val wasn’t dead, only wounded. Every single word out of her mouth felt like a white-hot spike being driven into the back of my skull. I couldn’t take it anymore.
Head still bowed, I wiped my mouth off against my shoulder. The Grey Man’s blood stained the jumpsuit and then, gathe
ring the bit in my mouth, I spat across the table. A thick glob of mucus and blood landed on Dr. Halliburton’s cheek.
Her eyes blew wide open, and her pursed lips trembled. I laughed as she shrieked. “What is wrong with you!”
I kept laughing as she tore through her bag. She threw things from it in all directions, in search of the handkerchief at the bottom. As she scrubbed her face clean, her entire body shook. Whether it was from rage, disgust, or a satisfying combination of the two, I didn’t care.
“I told you I was going to kill you,” I said when my laughter settled.
“Ha,” the doctor replied loudly. “Unless you somehow have the ability to spit venom, Mr. Zhukov, I don’t—”
“Do you know what sort of stuff they pump into Grey Men, Doctor? What sort of chemicals make them into the monsters they are?” I interrupted.
She fell silent and still. I relished in the tense moments as her face drained of all color. Then, with deliberate pace, I told her, “Nothing normal people—people like you—should ever come in contact with.”
“Good try, but you ingested some, too.”
I chuckled once more and stuck out my bloodstained tongue to show she was correct. “I did. I was a Y.I.D. dog, though. Maybe I’m not one anymore, but I’m still full of the same crap which makes me immune.”
The paler Dr. Halliburton turned, the more noticeable the red blemish on her cheek became. The swollen skin blotched, visibly irritated, just like the doctor herself. All at once, she rose from her chair and turned to the camera in the corner, shouting out, “You’d better have someone heading down here right now!”
“Too late,” I said with a small smile.
Honestly, with how small of an amount of blood she’d come in contact with, she would probably walk away with nothing more than a bad rash. It was so much fun to give her a dose of her own medicine though.
Still livid, Dr. Halliburton whirled back toward me. My smile seemed to cut into her pride and gouge at what patience she might have had left. She ripped a folder from the bottom of the stack on the table, the others flying to the floor. From the folder, she pulled a yellow slip of paper whose bold header read: Sanity Ruling of Prisoner 9-3-5-1-1.
“Any last words?”
I kept smiling and said nothing at all. With undignified haste, the doctor slammed the paper on the table between us, checked the top box, and scrawled her signature on the bottom line. She folded the paper up and stuffed it into her purse along with her phone and tablet. With one trembling hand still clutching the handkerchief, Dr. Halliburton dabbed at her cheek where the red splotch had darkened and was spreading rapidly in the direction of her eye.
“Take him back to his cell,” she ordered the Grey Men.
One of the giants unlocked the chain connecting my handcuffs to the floor and was dragging me toward the door when I said, “Same time next week, Dr. Halliburton?”
“You foul, loathsome…” She hissed, trailing off as if she couldn’t think of anything vile enough to describe me. “You won’t be alive this time next week! You won’t even be alive this time tomorrow!”
Even with my execution sentence secured, I smiled all the way back to my prison cell. Any onlooker would think I’d genuinely lost my mind. In actuality, I was smiling because during Dr. Halliburton’s frenzy, I’d figured out how I was going to get to Val.
Oxford Pillar 4—Seattle, WA
Tuesday, November 17th, 2076—11:22 a.m.
un, we need to run,” I said between pants.
“But you’ve—” Val started.
“Had worse. Now run!”
Val grabbed my arm and pulled it over his shoulders so he could hoist me to my feet. The stress it put on the wound wrenched a yell out of me, but I urged Val to keep moving until we were on the other side of the truck. The second we were out of sight, I fell against the truck. Val let go of my arm, and I moved my hands to see how much damage had been done.
I peeled my shirt away and stared down at my bloody mess of a torso. Pain pulsed through every inch of my body, blistering from the inside out, but it didn’t feel like the bullet caught anything I couldn’t live without. That could have just been wishful thinking on my part, though.
Val took hold of the hem of my shirt and pushed it further up. One hand he pressed into my chest shook while the other worked to untie the scarf around his neck. Even if it was nowhere close to a morphine injection, the unexpected touch of his cold skin against my own helped distract me from the pain.
Val stepped even closer. I held my shirt out of the way as he wrapped the scarf around my midriff. During the fleeting seconds in which his arms were on either side of me, my mind reeled. I was back in the hall with him. I focused on the memory to distract myself from the hole in my gut.
“Can you move?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I grunted. “I’ll be fine.”
Abruptly, the scarf was pulled tight. I slammed a fist against the truck keeping me on my feet. Val grumbled an apology as he quickly double-knotted the scarf and yanked my shirt back down.
“That’ll have to do for now. Let’s get moving.”
We took off into one of the cul-de-sacs branching from the main road, Grey Men flooding the street behind us. People fled for their homes, knocking down anyone who got in their way, while frantic parents rushed from their porches into the road to bring crying children inside.
Every time gunshots fired, Val cringed and looked the way we’d come. When he stopped, I grabbed his arm and said, “The others will be fine, Val. We can’t go back.”
“I have to!”
“No, you don’t.”
“Anya’s back there!”
Val yanked out of my grip and ran for the street. I chased after him, but we both froze in our tracks when four Grey Men came around the corner into our cul-de-sac. I pulled the gun from my jeans, pointed it at the Grey Men, and called to Val, “Run!”
Val ran toward me as I fired at the Grey Men. With the two bullets leftover from earlier, I managed to take down one Grey Man. I had just clicked a new magazine into place when the Grey Men, weapons half raised, paused. They exchanged confused glances, and when their heads turned toward me again, I saw it. That look of realization. They knew who I was. I could let them catch me. I could let them take me home.
The thought vanished the second Val seized my wrist. He yanked me along into running beside him, cursing a different swear every few feet. I knew I couldn’t just hand myself over to the Grey Men with him around.
We hurried out of the street and through the small alley formed between two houses. I stopped long enough to flip over an overflowing trash bin, obstructing the path behind us and hopefully biding us some time.
Val waited a few feet ahead, scoping out the yard behind the house for any sign of Grey Men. I caught up with him and asked, “Where now?”
“There’s a park on the other side of that fence. Get through it and over the fence beyond, and we’ll be pretty close to the market. From there, we can make a break for the bridge. Train won’t be safe, so we’ll have to get back to base on foot.” He said it so fast; some of his panted words blended into the others. He looked at the bloodstain on my shirt, one of my hands half covering it, and asked, “Think you can manage that?”
I didn’t think twice about my answer. “Of course.”
We took off across the yard and flew over the fence. Getting over was painful; the jolt of impact upon landing was excruciating. My knees buckled, but Val grabbed my arm with one hand and steadied me with the other on my shoulder.
“Jesus Christ, you’re such a lying idiot. You can’t keep up like this.” Val scowled. Before I could argue, he pulled my arm over his shoulder again. I felt so ridiculous being led along with Val supporting half my weight. I was a highly-skilled special agent. I’d been shot tons of times and been fine on my own.
“I’m fine! I don’t need your—”
“Oh would you shut up and—”
The sound of Grey Men scrambling over t
he trashcan blockade back the way we’d come broke up our bickering. They were getting closer. At this rate we’ll both get caught, I thought. I’d be taken into custody, and Val would be…
“We have to split up,” I said, shoving him away. Val stepped forward to try and help me again. I held him off with one arm while the other pressed firm over my bindings. “You heard me! Get going!”
Val’s shock turned into anger, and at first I thought he was going to put up a fight. Without a word, though, he grabbed my arm and yanked me into running after him toward the fence at the far end of the park. I couldn’t believe he was being so stubborn.
“Stop being stupid!” I barked.
“Nik, shut up!” Val snapped at me. He hurried us to a rickety shed halfway across the park and kicked the door open. Bags of mulch, buckets of paint, and a few gardening tools were shoved into a corner. Val pulled me inside and shut the door.
I couldn’t see beyond the tip of my nose. The small skylight was too filthy to let in much light, and the air was stagnant from the dirt our feet kicked up from the floor. With one hand, I found the wall and rested against it, shutting my eyes and bringing both hands over my wound. Blood had already soaked through the scarf.
“Stay here,” Val said somewhere to my left.
I nodded, even though I knew he couldn’t see it. Movement, shifting, and the sound of something getting knocked over. The door creaked, and my eyes opened wide. Val was leaving. My hand shot out and grabbed hold of his jacket. I yanked him back inside and insisted, “You can’t go back out there.”
“I can outrun them,” Val argued with one hand still on the door.
“You can’t outrun their bullets.”
“I just have to get over the fence. I’ll lead them away from you and—”
Grey Men crashed against the fence we’d scaled. They weren’t good at climbing, due to their size, but we still only had a minute before they were upon us. I watched Val’s eyes light up. He had an idea, one which I hoped was better than him running off on his own. Acting as a decoy. To protect me.