by Mike Leon
“Uh,” Nick says. “I don’t like this.”
The quiet echo of those limping splashes is impossible to place. It could be a mile away or only a hundred feet. The only certainty is that it continues to draw closer.
“She’s still six hundred meters out,” Sid mentions in the offhand before talking back to the phone. “What do you mean? How am I supposed to get across the river without them seeing me?”
“Who is? Who’s down here with us?”
“I can heeeeeeeeear you.” The shrill wail reverberates along the walls from somewhere farther down the tunnel.
“Oh my,” Nick says. “Can we go now?”
“Oh,” Sid says. “Clever. ETA? Good.”
Sid drops down into the water while holding the cell phone up to avoid the splash. “We have to go now,” he barks. “Now!”
When the wailing voice rises again through the tunnels it comes as a drawn out chant. It is something sung, not spoken.
إِنَّا للهِ وَإِنَّـا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعونَ
It is the eeriest thing Nick has ever heard. The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. “That sounds closer than you said,” Nick says.
“Yeah. I lied,” Sid says. “Come on.”
Sid hustles into the next tunnel. The super soldier stomps through the stream as Nick struggles to keep up. He stumbles once as Sid fades into the blackness ahead. Glancing back down the tunnel he sees something emerging in the light of the storm drain chamber they left behind.
It’s a woman, covered in a black burqa and hobbling forward with a ghoulish gait. Her face is a featureless black blank. Her flowing clothes make her appear even more like a specter and her high pitched, child-like voice provides an eerie dissonance with the horrible place that surrounds them.
“Oh God,” he says. He rises out of the sewage and runs much faster than before, feeling lighter even though his now waterlogged clothes have added a good deal to the weight he carries. He moves so quickly he thinks he may even gain on his strange and relentless new acquaintance. The thought hardly completes itself before he trips again, this time falling face first into something foul smelling and prickly.
Nick warbles in terror as he pushes his head up from the fuzzy carcass of something that may have been a raccoon or opossum, but is no longer definitively one or the other. He heaves up a glob of vomit as he stumbles over the floating mass of corpulence. Suddenly he feels a steely grip clamp down on his arm and tug him forward.
“Quit fucking around,” Sid says. “Keep moving. She can’t run for shit.”
Nick forces himself forward, trying his best to block out any thoughts of the dead thing he stumbled on, but it is difficult with the taste of it clinging around his mouth and the stench still in his nose. He feels the urge to stop and gag again, but he must not. He strains to preoccupy himself with some innocuous distraction. The first piece of fluff that fills his thoughts is every bit as baffling as banal: the musical overture from the 1964 film Zorba the Greek.
It begins with the slow intro of a bouzouki in 2/4 timing. Or is it 4/4? Nick has never understood musical timing. He just knows this song starts slowly and it gets faster.
He glances back, almost involuntarily, and sees the featureless silhouette of their pursuer framed in the tunnel mouth in front of the grey glow of the storm drain they left behind.
The bouzouki picks up the tempo.
“You cannot escape the hand of Allah!” rasps the terrible shadow.
Nick tries harder to concentrate on the bouzouki. It is an instrument he cannot play, and isn’t sure he has ever inspected from less than ten feet away.
He yelps as Sid snatches him by the arm again, this time from the side, an angle that should be impossible unless he can walk through walls. The super soldier yanks Nick sideways in the darkness and he comes to realize they turned at a juncture that was invisible to him in the dark.
“Faster,” Sid barks. “We can lose her up here.”
Nick threshes along behind him. There is light ahead, but the sound that comes with it is worrisome. It seems like an impossibility at first. Maybe the water is simply traveling faster up there, he thinks. The tunnel may have an incline. If it echoes through the tunnel it might make a—no. His useless conjecture is proven wrong quickly.
Sid pulls him toward the mouth of the tunnel and mounting fear. The river of dirty water they stand in flows over the lip of the tunnel and down into a concrete chamber which is ten feet across going both directions and deeper than Nick cares to estimate. Sunlight filters through a square steel grate centered on the ceiling only a few feet above them. Another tunnel, set six feet lower in the opposite wall, dumps its own waterfall into the unknown depths below.
“We have to jump across,” Sid says.
“That’s crazy!” Nick yells back. “We won’t make it!”
Sid shrugs and dashes forward, leaping out of the end of the tunnels and clearing the ten feet across the chamber with no difficulty. He splashes into the other tunnel and plants his hands on the walls to steady himself against the water rushing against him. Then he turns back to Nick.
“Is there anything you want me to tell your kid?” he says. “Your wife? Anybody?”
“I can’t do that!” Nick yells.
“It’s not that far! And it’s lower too!” Sid extends a hand from the end of the tunnel and into the gap between them, as if Nick will even make it far enough for that to make a difference. “Here!”
Nick looks down into the pit below, trying to convince himself the gap is smaller than it really is. Then he looks back down the tunnel behind him. A voice calls from the darkness.
“I’m coming for you,” the banshee wails.
Nick turns back to look across the gap. He closes his eyes and begins to pray.
Πάτερ ἡμῶν, ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς•
ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου,
“She’s in your head,” Sid remarks with gruff annoyance. “You can’t let her get in your head.”
ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου,
γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου, ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς.
“Dude,” Sid says. “We really don’t have time for this.”
Τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον.
Καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν,
ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφίεμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν.
“You will die!” cries the banshee. Nick looks back and sees her silky shadow less than fifty yards back. He skips to the end of the prayer as he runs with the stream.
ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ.
He leaps from the end of the tunnel as a gust of immense pressure paddles him from behind. A spray of foamy white water spritzes past him and the chamber rattles with a resounding gong. His screams do not compete with the ringing in his ears as he stretches out his arms to grasp the tunnel ahead, but he is far short of closing the gap. His surroundings seem to slow down as he angles downward much too sharply and he warbles in fear as the depths seem to rush up at him.
Suddenly, the room stops moving around him. He seems to halt in mid-air, looking down into the bottomless abyss. Water splatters down against his back and flows over his shoulders. Sid has caught him by his belt.
The kill team hoists him up through the drainage waterfall and into the next tunnel, dumping him in the middle of another brown stream. Nick is soaking wet, breathing hard, half deaf, and still terrified.
“Ama een,” Sid says. It’s an undecipherable and alien sounding utterance to Nick’s breaking ears, but he already knows enough to guess it is some kind of sardonic comment. “Ou ah ayl eeyor akk.”
“Wha?” Nick yells as he stumbles up from the tunnel floor. The scraping throbbing pain in his shoulder clues him in before Sid does. He shrieks an
d turns his head at the most extreme angle he can. He is able to turn just enough to see the end of a spindly brown stick jutting from his left shoulder blade.
“I said you’re a drama queen, and you got nails in your back!” Sid yells “Hold still!”
“What? What?!” Nick says. He has no time to question any more before Sid plucks the first of the nails from his shoulder. Nick screams. It hurts more than anything Nick has ever felt. Sid pulls another nail while he is screaming. “Stop doing that!”
“You should pull them out! They’ll do more damage if you leave them in while you’re moving!” Sid says.
“How many are there?!”
“Three more!” He yanks another one and Nick screams again. “Two more!”
“Where did they come from?”
“Her burqa. The fuckers load up their clothes with shrapnel. Most of the time the actual blast isn’t powerful enough to be lethal. It’s this shit that gets you.”
Sid turns back and yells across the chamber behind them.
“I’m gonna cut you open, bitch!” Sid yells, pointing threateningly across the chamber. “As many times as it takes!”
Nick is confused until he sees the target of Sid’s rage with his own eyes. She stands glowering gleefully down at them from the higher tunnel mouth. Her wet and naked form shines like a days old corpse in the sunlight beaming down from above. Black vapor rises from her, making its way up the chamber. Her shattered teeth form a jagged smile that underlines the four-letters carved over her face like a horrific mask.
“Her face….” Nick says.
“Yeah. It’s not pretty.”
“But she blew herself up,” Nick says. “How?”
“You’re the holy man,” Sid says. “You tell me.”
“I…” Nick shakes his head. “I don’t…” Suddenly the world seems more broken than ever. Or it could be perfect in a way he thought impossible before. Nick can’t decide which. He only knows that he feels much smaller than he did yesterday.
He screams as Sid yanks the last two nails out of his shoulder in one go. One of them comes out of bone and sends the sensation of a million needles shooting down his arm.
“Let’s go!” Sid says.
INT. MESSY APARTMENT - DAY
“You don’t know your password?” roars al-Kilij. “You lie, kafir!”
“No! No! I’m talkin’ the truth, man. I don’t know that shit!” The reply comes from a fat black American who Mahmoud does not know by name. They chased him to this messy apartment with directions from Samir, who sees all from the sky. His shirt is a sports jersey for the Oakland Raiders, and his pants, despite a belt which appears unbroken, droop down almost to his knees and would fall around his ankles if he didn’t hold them up with one hand at all times. “I didn’t even know there was a password!”
A woman blubbers from the corner of the tiny apartment with its fallen drapes and gnats flitting around a sink full of dirty dishes. She is fat and wears clothes that must have been sized for a woman of half her girth. Doughy rolls of flesh cascade over the edges of her stretched out pants. A jihadi named Muhammad keeps his rifle trained on her while al-Kilij does what he does best.
“You will tell me the password or you will die!” al-Kilij says as he draws a large sword, bent into a forty-five degree angle halfway down the blade, from the sheath on his back. It is his namesake, so bestowed long ago by the Serbian Christians of Bosnia, who learned to fear him for it. Al-Kilij swings the sword and plants it firmly in the carpeted flooring next to the kafir’s head, where it stands on its own.
“I swear I don’t know!” the man squeals. “Don’t hurt me!”
Al-Kilij turns his attention to Mahmoud, the youngest person in the room by decades. “You believe him?”
“I don’t know. Should I?” Mahmoud replies. He doesn’t understand why al-Kilij, great champion of jihad and famed interrogator would care for his advice.
“You’re young. You know about these devices. Can he not know his password?”
“He might not know.” Mahmoud shrugs. “If the phone saved it, maybe he forgot.”
“How do we get it back?”
EXT. RIVERSIDE - DAY
Sid emerges from a storm drain and scans the landscape. There’s a cinder block retaining wall at his back and the bottom of a bridge over his head. Its rebar ribs and concrete skin block out the sky. It breathes the whoosh of passing cars atop it. The hulking structure juts out over a river.
“I’m in place,” Sid says into the phone.
“Okay,” the player responds. “There should be a black car pulling up in just a second.”
Sid sees it slowly plodding down the dirty road underneath the bridge. It is a large sedan, shiny from a fresh wash. A man wearing thick plastic sunglasses sits behind the wheel, his skin tinted blue by the window. A paper placard dangles on the end of a flimsy string from the rear view mirror. It reads: UBER.
“What’s happening up there?” asks Father Nick from the drain behind him.
“Just stay there,” Sid growls back as he approaches the car.
Sid stomps toward the car as the driver inspects him nervously. The window slides down with a mechanical whirr and the driver waves at him.
“Hi there,” the driver says. “You looking for an UBER?”
“Yes,” Sid says, leaning down to look in the window. He only glances briefly at the driver’s face, as he’s much more interested in the position of the gear selector. Once he sees that the car is in park, he grabs the little man by the shoulders and yanks him up out of his seat.
“Wha-What the fuck?!?” the driver yells as Sid pulls him through the window and wraps his head in a sleeper hold strong enough to choke an elephant.
He drags the thrashing driver through the window and out onto the gravel next to the car. He leaves the unconscious schmuck lying there and then turns back to summon Nick from the drain.
“Did you have to beat him up?” Nick says, as he climbs out of the storm drain.
“I didn’t beat him up,” Sid answers. “I choked him out.”
“Whatever. Did you have to?”
“Yes. Now get in the car.”
The priest follows orders. He walks around the car clutching his blood-soaked shoulder and opens the passenger door. He’s sopping wet and bleeding, but not as beat up as Sid.
The two of them sit down in the car at the same time. The plan is pretty simple. They lost the satellite’s peeping eye in the tunnel, and even if the Islamists zoom in on every storm drain in the city, they won’t see Sid and the priest leaving any of them. Even if they know this drain is here, at best they’ll see an unknown and unremarkable black car driving under the bridge and then back out again. It’s not perfect, but it should buy enough time to get him where he wants to go.
“Put down the visors,” Sid says. He thumbs up at the hinged sun visors attached to the ceiling where it meets the windshield. It is unlikely to make much difference, but they could make it more difficult to spot the two of them via satellite. He pulls down the one mounted over the steering wheel and several compact discs fall in his lap. He gathers them up and throws them out the open window to his left.
Of course the radio is on. Every car radio he encounters in America seems to be turned on and spewing some confusing musical garbage. This one is going on with some feeble sounding boy wailing about the story of his life and taking someone home and Sid just wants it out of his head. It’s pathetic. He reaches for the radio and notices the iPhone on the end of a hinged arm mounted on the dashboard. He pokes the radio’s power button to quiet the incessant schmaltz before he yanks the iPhone away from its mount and places it in his pocket.
“If you see that girl again, run,” Sid says. “Don’t waste your breath chanting in weird languages.”
“Prayer is never a waste of breath,” Nick snaps back. “And it’s not a weird language. It’s Greek. We practically invented all the other languages.”
“It sounds like the shit the rags speak.”
Sid puts his foot on the gas and the car crackles forward on the gravel. They do not have far to go.
“Well, not everybody in the world just speaks Uh-mare-i-kunn.”
“I’m not American. And I speak two languages. English and Violence. Everybody understands at least one of them.”
“Violence. From the Ancient Greek βίη, meaning force. See? We invented that too.”
“You’re gonna have to invent a way to stop hemorrhaging if you let that crazy bitch get close to you again.”
“Who is she?” the priest asks.
“Somebody from the past,” he answers. “Somebody who should be dead.”
“I figured out that much from looking at her. You need to tell me more than that.”
“You think you can figure out how to disable her weird powers?”
“No. I can’t begin to explain what I saw down there. I don’t think Neil Degrasse Tyson could take a shot at that. But whatever you know can’t hurt.”
“Her name is Fatimah,” Sid says. “I met her in Afghanistan four years ago. Her brother sold bootleg CDs outside an army base where I was operating with a team of…” Sid briefly ponders what term he can use to most concisely describe Kill Team Three. “…really bad guys. She wandered away from their truck and was attacked by a pack of wild dogs. I intervened. Turns out that was a mistake.”
Sid turns onto the main roadway from the gravel lot that passes under the bridge. Cars are parked along the sides of the street here. A few sit at a stop light up ahead, and he can see more running the stop/start gauntlet of traffic lights for the twenty blocks he needs to go. If Fatimah’s suicide squad finds him here, there will be massive collateral damage. People will die.
“She wants to kill you because you saved her from dogs? They really do things differently in Central Asia.”
“There’s more to the story. My brother, also a super soldier, really really really bad guy, he didn’t like what I did. So he went out at night and found her. Told the team he caught her trying to steal supplies from the base. It was a lie, but I don’t think they cared either way.”
“They cut her up like that?”