Mr. Clear

by Stewart, Graham

  To add insult to injury, his assailant then stood, or rather stepped, on his back to get past him. There was no shoe. It was a bare foot. Haye felt it clearly.

  Fueled by a cocktail of embarrassment and adrenaline, Haye rolled over and fumbled for his sidearm. But he couldn’t see his attacker. The blow to his nose had impaired his vision, but not that much. The ponytail was looking down at him from his seat, his street attitude all but gone, his mouth open in shock.

  A high-pitched alarm rang out and there was a rush of air. The emergency exit swung wide open, the door slamming into the outside of the bus.

  The driver ground the vehicle to a halt.

  Haye lurched forward as he tried to get to his feet. He pulled himself along to the open exit and peered out. The bus was just at the terminal, passengers from arriving and departing flights dancing around each other on the sidewalk.

  Haye jumped down to the curb and faces looked his way. If the way his face felt was anything to go by, he must have been a mess.

  “Moore, where are you?” he said into his radio.

  “Right here behind you,” said Moore, putting his hand on Haye’s shoulder.

  “Where did they go?”

  “Who?”

  “They just escaped through the emergency exit!”

  “Only person came through that door was you, man. And you don’t look so good.”

  Haye felt lightheaded, the delayed effects of the injury catching up with him. He sat down, to steady himself, on the lip of the bus’s emergency exit, exhausted and beaten, physically and mentally.

  He had no idea how, but the suspects had just upped and disappeared.

  2

  Dyson shivered and blew into his fingers. He pulled his collar up tight around his chin and looked over at Powell, shaking his head. “I don’t know how you do it, man. Standing there in nothing but a goddamn t-shirt.”

  The panel van rocked a little on its suspension as Morgan did press-ups to keep himself warm. He stopped and sat up, breathing hard. “Aren’t you even a little cold?”

  Powell’s eyes didn’t move from the monitor. “Guess I’m just thick-skinned,” he said.

  The gray van was concealed in a clump of trees on a hillside overlooking the warehouse. The place was massive. Some five hundred thousand square feet, according to the website of the pharmaceutical company operating it.

  “That place is scary big,” said Morgan. “Freak me out working night watchman in a place that size. I’m talking The Shining here. Know what I’m saying?”

  “Ghosts?” said Powell, a smile threatening to break on his face. “I wish.”

  Morgan was right. One man looking out for a building that size would have been a one hell of an ask. By rights, it would have needed a whole police force to keep it secure. So that’s what the company plumped for, hiring themselves a security firm staffed only by highly decorated, retired members of the force. Even so, the place had been getting steadily robbed blind on a regular basis for the last few weeks.

  The warehouse supplied hospitals of all shapes, sizes and disciplines, right across the country with drugs of all types. Whatever your modern-day doctor, drug dealer or, indeed, drug addict needed, this place had it in abundance.

  That’s what had brought Powell and his team here.

  The men they were pursuing were individuals with a particular set of needs, which could not be met at their local clinic.

  They were also men with a very unique skillset, supremely suited to breaching the high level of security employed here.

  Powell and his men had been here all day. They had watched the warm sunlight give way to the unforgiving cold of the desert night. Except for the drop in temperature, the conditions made their job a whole lot easier.

  The hours of business at the warehouse were strictly nine to six. There was no shift system in operation. So all warehouse staff were long gone. Few cars remained on the lot. The ones that did were all accounted for and belonged to the security firm.

  Powell watched the monitor intently, the screen split into twelve panels relaying live feeds from the dozen cameras Dyson had stationed to cover all the entry points to the building, large and small. Under normal circumstances, the darkness would have posed a problem, but these cameras were not the type found on your average electronics store’s shelf. They employed the most state-of-the-art infrared image acquisition and motion detection technology.

  And right this second they were acquiring and detecting something that shouldn’t have been there.

  “Movement. South east corner,” said Powell.

  “How many?” said Morgan.

  Dyson reclaimed his seat at the console. “I make three.”

  “Odd number,” said Morgan.

  “Prime one too,” said Dyson.

  The three figures appeared out of the middle of a grouping of parked container trucks belonging to the company.

  Dyson traced their movement across the screen with his finger. While their faces appeared mixed shades of bright orange and yellow, the rest of their bodies were cast a slightly darker shade of green than the background.

  “They’re dressed,” said Dyson.

  “That rules our guys out,” said Powell.

  “Yeah. Would kind of defeat the purpose I suppose,” said Morgan.

  On screen, the men jogged, hunched to the wall, where they found solace in the extra shadow. They prowled along the side of the building toward a small door. It was a fire exit with no handle or locking mechanism on the outside. The door could only be opened from within.

  After a few seconds, it was.

  “Case closed,” said Powell.

  Plain as day, two men wearing the uniforms of the security firm greeted the three figures in the doorway.

  “These guys are on the ball,” said Dyson, reading from another monitor, where a graph was detailing the energy usage in the complex. “All of the cameras on that side of the building have ‘gone down’.”

  Each of the three figures was loaded up with box after box by the men in uniform, which they then carried back to the cover of the parked trucks.

  It was a well-rehearsed maneuver.

  In less than three minutes they made three return trips before vanishing back into the shadows.

  The fire exit was sealed and the cameras reactivated.

  “Neat arrangement,” said Dyson.

  “I’d say our mystery shadow men work as drivers for the company anyway. They’ll probably sleep in the trucks now until morning, then load up as normal,” said Morgan.

  “And make a little extra for themselves on each of their scheduled deliveries,” said Powell. “Then split the proceeds with the rent-a-cops.”

  “Enterprising,” said Dyson. “You want me to call it in?”

  Powell shook his head. “Not our problem. And not the reason we’re here.”

  “Fair enough,” said Morgan. “So what do we do now?”

  Dyson started the engine.

  “We do what we’ve been doing all along,” said Powell. “We follow the breadcrumbs, keep listening out for more ghost stories.”

  3

  Two days ago.

  Ben lay on the ground, doubled up, gasping for air that was having a hard time finding its way into his lungs. His head was spinning. But not as a result of the lack of oxygen, or even the fall that had put him on his back in the first place.

  He had always made a habit of not having any habits. He liked to move around, never return to the same place too regularly, to establish any kind of pattern. For that reason, he had not been to this building in some time.

  The high school was a nice one. Or at least it was the last time he was there. Since then, security had been upped and tightened in no small way. The main entrance, instead of being a wide-open lobby, was now a row of individual doorframe-style metal detectors, each with a turnstile operated by a pass card.

  It was nothing more than a hiccup to him really. He could easily have negotiated the barrier, but decided t
o err on the side of caution and find a way around.

  The first that sprang to mind was over the wall of the football field, no more than a two-minute walk away, and not much more than a six-foot vault. Well within his athletic ability.

  What Ben had not allowed for was the new preventative measure introduced along the same perimeter wall he intended to scale. The electric shock from the fence was small, but enough of a jolt to make him lose his balance and fall back to the concrete below in a heap.

  If he had bothered to read the warning sign atop the wall he would have known this, but somehow caution had given way to complacency.

  When it came to obtaining a little free tuition, Ben had always found the big schools the best. The colleges and universities especially, with their huge lecture theaters. Plenty of space to move about in and, usually, lots of empty seats to choose from. There was minimal risk of detection with so many places to hide and watch and listen.

  It was all there. An all you can eat information buffet. History. Geography. Psychology. Ben felt blessed to have it at his disposal. But it never ceased to amaze him how disinterested most of the students were. Yawning. Talking. Openly listening to music on their phones. To each other’s inane chitchat. To anyone but the lecturers addressing them.

  Ben had no idea what age he was exactly, but he guessed he was older than these high school students. He might have said they had the mentality of elementary kids, but that would have been a slight against elementary schoolers. Younger children were so much more eager to learn. So much hungrier for knowledge.

  They made a refreshing change, in that respect, but the smaller local schools were riskier environments to operate in. Not just because the tighter spaces, but because of the smaller students.

  Young children are tuned into wavelengths older ones have long since vacated. Never be fooled into thinking they’re daydreaming. It’s when they’re staring into space, that they see things other people around them can’t.

  Once, in a school he had since taken note maybe not to visit again, one boy – he couldn’t have been more than five – made eye contact with Ben and smiled. Mistaken, he assured himself, Ben carefully moved to the back of the classroom, where he then found the boy had twisted around and was staring at him still.

  Ben had often heard the expression, or maybe he had read it, he wasn’t sure: children say the funniest things. Sitting in on a second-grade class being taught one day, which he did from time to time (not just second grade obviously because all age groups had something different to offer), he chanced upon one of those limber, energetic hands-on teachers, the ones who bounce from desk to desk around the classroom like a pinball, quizzing each of her students on what one superpower they would like if they had a choice. Being able to fly was miles out in front until one little girl said she’d love to be invisible; how it would mean she’d be able to sneak downstairs undetected at night, right past her parents, into the kitchen and nab herself a sneaky chocolate chip cookie.

  In a flash, all the other students were revising their answers to match hers, imagining the possibilities, the endless avenues of mischief waiting to be explored if nobody could see them.

  It made Ben laugh. To himself. Laughing out loud would have just scared the hell out of the kids. If only they knew the truth. How difficult it was. How careful you had to be.

  All the time.

  Being invisible was not a superpower.

  It was a super-impairment.

  What was so super about hiding your whole life? Trying to avoid detection. And all that it would inevitably bring with it.

  How super was it not being able to wear clothes? To have to walk around naked all the time to ensure that you stayed truly invisible. To constantly have to watch where you stepped because you could not enjoy the protection of footwear.

  How super was it to have to live in a place warm and sunny enough so that you did not freeze to death in the winter, only to make sure you stayed confined to the shadows in the summer so you didn’t end up badly sunburnt?

  Even eating was a problem. He couldn’t carry money for obvious reasons. So he wasn’t able to buy food. And if he was, he could only imagine the stupefied look on some McDonald’s counter assistant’s face as a fist full of dollar bills floated toward them, and then the horrified look that would follow as a Big Mac was broken down in mid-air by unseen digestive acids.

  What a mental picture.

  Scavenging was the only option, vying for leftovers in the dumpsters at the back of McDonald’s every night with the vermin and the vagrants. Over the homeless, he had the advantage that every time they were chased off by security it gave him the opportunity to get in and grab what he could. With the rats and stray dogs he had to be more careful. The last thing he wanted was to be bitten. It wasn’t like he could go in for a tetanus shot or a course of antibiotics.

  It was by some fluke of his being that he had not already succumbed to sickness. He had a certain resilience to sickness and infection. That much he had learned already for himself. In one of the most painful ways possible.

  ***

  Ben’s home had not always been Miami.

  Home had once been in a remote bayou in Louisiana, miles from anywhere, in what looked on the outside like a derelict plantation house, overgrown with weeds and swamp vines and consumed by time.

  That was just what the people who cared for him wanted anyone who might have chanced upon it to think. In reality, they lived beneath the house in a fortified stronghold dubbed The Nest.

  Only Ben and his mother, Eve, were invisible. She never spoke of where they came from, or how they came to be the way they were. Knowing no other existence, it was easy to accept that he was different. Eve always told him that he was special. But then every mother tells her little boy that, doesn’t she?

  He was also the only child in the house.

  The other adults in The Nest were an interesting mix. Half were forever dressed in white, the other half in green.

  Scientists and soldiers.

  Most of the time, Ben was kept strictly inside where, when he wasn’t eating or sleeping, he was being taught the same things every other child his age was, with some of the scientists acting as tutors. There was a lot of math, he remembered.

  When he was permitted outside, it was only under the watchful eye of Jason.

  Jason was like the silverback. The alpha male. The leader of the group. And Ben and Eve were his charges. A former Special Forces operator, Jason taught Ben the importance of staying physically fit. He showed him how to swim, how to climb a tree – even how to ride a bicycle. Life skills, he called them.

  Jason’s mantra was all to do with being prepared for every eventuality. From early on, he trained Ben in the basic martial arts so that he would be equipped to defend himself, should the need ever arise.

  Although Ben never saw a single person in the woods on the occasions when he was allowed outside, Jason was ever vigilant, constantly ready.

  When trouble eventually did show up, it was not in the form of a person, but a hurricane, which moved in from the Gulf of Mexico one summer.

  In the hours before it made landfall, he had heard the concerned mutterings. His mother shook him awake just after first light and one of Jason’s men ushered them both out of The Nest. With floodwaters threatening to drown them, the soldier moved them up into the attic of the old plantation house above.

  All hell broke loose right after.

  There was thunder.

  Several great cracks of it.

  Like gunshots.

  Ben crawled to the tiny, grime-covered window in the cramped loft space to get a better look.

  Water was swirling around the base of the sloped roof outside and looked set to envelope the entire house.

  His first thoughts were of those below. He was beginning to think the water had taken them when he heard movement directly beneath. Doors were being opened and slammed shut in quick succession and he could hear Dr. Woods calling their names.
>
  She was looking for them.

  Urgently.

  Her voice got closer and closer until he thought he could reach out and touch it.

  He was about to answer her when there was an almighty crash. Glass smashing. And a commotion outside.

  Ben and Eve went to the grime-covered window. Dr. Woods was lying out on the roof below in a carpet of glass along with Jason. They were locked in a struggle. Jason rolled over on his back and Ben saw a gun in his hand. Dr. Woods got her fingers underneath one of the slates, worked it loose and slammed it into the side of Jason’s head. He dropped the gun, stunned, and she scrambled after it. He kicked it off the roof into the water before she could get to it and grabbed a hold of her. They lost their balance, falling over and tumbling toward the water. Jason grabbed a hold of the old chimney column. It had been crumbling before, but now it was literally dissolving under the weight of the torrent. Dr. Woods grabbed on to Jason’s legs as she slid past and wrenched herself up on to his back.

  She looked right up at the window and, in that instant, Ben understood what was happening.

  The way they had been bundled into the attic.

  Dr. Woods’ searching cries.

  Jason running around brandishing a gun.

  Probably on account of the storm, his ‘orders’ had changed. Instead of protecting mother and son, he had been instructed to do the opposite. And Dr. Woods was doing all she could to stop him.

  She said something to Jason and he mouthed something back in reply. Then the water took them, both Dr. Woods and Jason disappearing into the deluge and out of Ben’s life forever.

  The whole episode affected his mother deeply.

  In the hours that followed, she said nothing, just sat at the window fixated on the swirling water. Its level did not climb any further, but it did not drop either. They were adrift in a sea, not just of water, but of massive uncertainty.