Hollow

by Lee Doty

  The soft footsteps resumed, more hesitant than before. They were going to risk it. This was going to work. Ash smiled and she redoubled her efforts to sound like she was trying to free herself.

  “Gas!” a hushed exclamation from outside.

  A few more seconds passed, then there was a screech of warped metal as one of the back doors was forced open a few inches, enough to allow in a rush of winter air, a spray of harsh streetlights and a small, smoking canister. The door banged shut again and Ash was left staring at a hissing canister rolling around on the ceiling not far from her head.

  She stopped breathing in mid exhale, not daring to risk taking in any gas with a gulp of air. She struggled harder, reaching for the canister. After a little bit of writhing and reaching, her fingers closed on the cylinder that was pumping the small compartment full of a chemical agent that was stinging her eyes, but not as much as tear gas would have.

  Ash wasn’t able to make out the markings on the canister. Perhaps it was the dim light or the billowing yellow fog of the chemical agent, or maybe just the stars that were now filling her stinging eyes. With a mental shrug, she realized it didn’t really matter if she knew what type of grenade this was… if it was nerve gas, she was dead; if it was a tranquilizer then she was going out.

  She returned to selling her resistance. With maybe half as much force as she could muster, she threw the canister at the door it had come through. Of course, it bounded ineffectively off the metal. There really hadn’t been any point to the action but to make the team outside feel powerful as she struggled in vain against their efforts to subdue her.

  She struggled more earnestly against her restraints, burning precious oxygen until her lungs were aching and her diaphragm began to spasm and the starbursts that filled her vision turned to a dark, shivering haze. Then she released the lock on her throat and the air, gasoline fumes, and chemical ordinance burned down her throat and into her lungs. There was a moment of retching agony, then blackness.

  Familiar Faces

  Chicago, 2020

  Jo sat on the deliberately uncomfortable bench inside the three small semi opaque walls of the bus stop. The light sweat from her long subway sprint cooled her skin and she pulled her jacket a bit tighter around her. On the way here, she had ducked into an alley and unscrewed the silencer from the pistol she’d lifted from the operator in the subway entrance. Now the silencer was in her jacket pocket and the pistol was tucked into the waistband of her pants over her appendix. She figured that if she needed to use the pistol again, the louder bang from the unsilenced Glock-21 would be more than a fair tradeoff against the possibility that the silencer could get caught in her waistband if she had to draw it quickly. The full sized pistol was big enough to be obvious in its hiding place, but her jacket fell below the line of her belt, so she didn’t fear discovery as long as she kept the jacket in place and didn’t give anyone an unrestrained hug.

  She shivered as the thought of an unrestrained hug instantly made her uncomfortable and she found herself looking again with dread at the doorway across the street.

  The entranceway to Jeremy’s apartment building looked familiar, though she’d only been here once for dinner before that horrible incident at the Oriental Theater when he’d taken her to Wicked. The doorway and lobby behind it seemed safe, yet at the same time it evoked a deep foreboding in her. Interesting, she thought, that on an evening when she’d been mugged, shot at, had jumped from a speeding car, evaded a group of trained killers, and shot two of them in the leg—heh, why was that so funny?—that even on an evening so full of the deadly and bizarre, she still had to psych herself up to approach her half-ex-boyfriend. Sure, she was trying to do the passive breakup—sure, she wasn’t returning his calls, and her psychiatrist and her only friend were both grilling her about it, but still, really?

  Instinct, she told herself, knowing it was a lie. It was true that some odd intuition had informed her that she should watch the building before going in, but that same intuition had told her about five minutes ago that it was time to go in. She’d been here for about fifteen minutes, moving between a small convenience store and the bus stop, watching the cars on the street and the few pedestrians out at this late hour. So far, she hadn’t noticed anything suspicious, or at least her intuition hadn’t informed her that anything was suspicious, as she really had no conscious idea what she was looking for. Anyway, it was time for the next step—the entering the building step—and yet here she sat in the partial shelter of the bus stop, stalling.

  Jo had walked up both sides of the street casually looking for cars that could conceal a surveillance team… nothing. She’d noticed no patterns in the traffic, seen no cars more than once, had found no suspicious snacks in the convenience stores, seen no hidden messages in the posted bus schedules on the wall to her left… she was now contemplating inspecting the trashcan to her right for abnormally small spies in tinfoil hats.

  “Coward.” She muttered, finally pushing herself to her feet.

  She smoothed her hair, cupped her hand before her mouth and checked her breath… a bit ripe, but she couldn’t figure a way that it could get her killed. She could probably rectify this serious problem with the aid of some convenience store gum if a stranger hadn’t stolen her wallet earlier tonight.

  So she stood, half in the shelter of the bus stop, paralyzed by the fear of halitosis.

  “Coward!” she said again, a bit louder and stepped from the curb and into the street.

  At the door, she tested it and found it locked. She then moved to the side, found Jeremy’s apartment number and pressed his call button… after a minute spent in the paralysis of apprehension… and after saying “coward” twice more.

  There was no immediate answer, so she turned around and began to walk away before forcing herself to return and ring again. Finally, she heard Jeremy’s sleepy voice, “Yeah?”

  She realized she’d been backing away because she had to take a step to get back to the small speaker. “Uh… Hey Jeremy… um… it’s Jo… uh…” She started.

  “Jo!” Jeremy’s voice brightened with a welcoming surprise, “Wow… Long time!”

  “Yeah… I um… I’ve been, well, you know…”

  She heard the door buzz. “Come on up! Don’t mind the mess or my bed-head… I wasn’t expecting anyone…”

  “Oh… I uh… thanks.” Jo completed the ritual of greeting with the same enthusiasm that a person might use to “complete” a burning building by jumping out a fortieth floor window. She grabbed the handle of the lobby door and pulled it open.

  The buzzing stopped and the door clicked closed behind her. She quickly moved through the minimal lobby, past a row of ancient mailboxes and a bank of two elevators. Jeremy’s apartment was on the seventh floor, but she wanted to see if running stairs was half as fun as running subway tunnels. She pressed through a battered steel door and began ascending the stairs two, then three at a time.

  On a landing for the third floor, she transferred the pistol to her right jacket pocket, as her run up the stairs kept threatening to dislodge it from the waistband of her pants. She didn’t like the idea of carrying the pistol in her pocket, as she felt that the jacket could foul a quick draw, and a shot fired from within the pocket could interfere with the slide and contribute to a failure to load the next round, but she hated the idea of running with it in her hand slightly more and the chance of it floating out of her waistband and bouncing down several flights of stairs even more than that.

  She reached the seventh floor, feeling the calm optimism of a serious runners’ high. She’d sprinted the final two floors, and she was breathing a bit heavy, but it only took her a few seconds to force her breathing back into a more normal pattern. On the landing, she glanced quickly about for security cameras then, finding none, she transferred the pistol from her jacket pocket to the waistband of her pants at the base of her spine… just in case there was any unrestrained hugging. She shivered then pushed through another steel door and into
a dim hallway with ancient, heavily patterned carpet. She tried to enter the hallway at a natural pace, casually looking both ways. She was alone in the hallway and nothing was pinging her radar, so she reversed her course. This is how she realized that she’d entered the hallway deliberately heading the wrong way: she had to turn around. She hadn’t planned it, but again had done it out of what was now becoming obvious to her as the force of long, well-ingrained habit. She walked to the end of this section of hallway and rounded a corner to the right. Jeremy’s corner apartment was the last one of the left.

  She stood before the dark wooden six panel door, again feeling the dread. From the tension in the back of her throat and the new knots in the pit of her stomach, she would have expected it to be room 669, with the 9 being another six that had come loose on the top and flipped over. She could then flip it slowly over as the dramatic music built to a crescendo when she realized along with the audience how evil this room really was as Dracula or possibly some psycho in a hockey mask would jerk the door open from the other side.

  Well, she thought looking at the 715 on the actual door, at least neither the imagined vampire nor the imagined serial killer of the imagined room 666 would want to give her the unrestrained hug Jeremy was no doubt contemplating. She took another deep breath, steeling her courage then knocked.

  From behind the door, she heard rustling, then footsteps. The peephole before her went black as Jeremy gazed at her through it. After a few seconds, she heard the scratching clicks of several deadbolts disengaging, and the door opened inward, flooding the dim hallway with a warm wash of light.

  “Jo!” Jeremy enthused, beautiful in old, worn pajama bottoms and an A-shirt that clung casually tight against his perfect pecs and abs, while allowing his chiseled shoulders and lithe wrestler’s arms to draw her eyes. Even his bed-mussed hair seemed a perfectly structured expression of sleepy, casual beauty. And then there was his face, which was somewhere between angel and underwear model, with his widely spaced intelligent eyes and the casual grin that seemed to be constantly ready to mock the imperfect world while promising something better. Again, Jo had to admit that he was absolutely gorgeous… not male-model gorgeous, but billionaire philanthropist superhero male model gorgeous.

  All of that though, was another way of saying that he was gross. Jo smiled, hoping that Jeremy would read it as friendly. His beauty was not just skin deep, but it was perfect; like an angel, like a statue, he was the ideal that most men would aim for and most women would find irresistible. Razor sharp wit, winning smile, perfect pecs, hair that just wouldn’t quit, even when shaken unexpectedly from sleep—all of that without the flaw that was somehow at the heart of real beauty. He was an industrial diamond, made in a laboratory without blemish, and therefore missing the flaw which gave a real diamond its worth. Real diamonds were created in adversity in the crushing depths of the earth, and that doesn’t happen without leaving a mark.

  He needed some scars, Jo thought casually, he needed those mementos of past struggle, past pain, past failure to clarify his beauty, to ground him to this imperfect world. She had the passing thought that with only one or possibly two serious car crashes, he’d be a real knockout.

  “What?” Jeremy asked, eyes narrowing suspiciously over that winning smile. “What’s so funny?”

  “Sorry, Jeremy”, Ash dodged, “you are just too beautiful.”

  “Is that why you’ve been avoiding me?” Mischievous smile.

  “Nah… I owe you money, remember?”

  “You owe me two dollars, Jo.”

  “..and thirty-two cents.” Jo corrected.

  “Have you brought it? You know, I was going to send someone to break your knees later in the week.” He waved her impatiently in. “Can I get you anything? Coffee—some beer, maybe?”

  Jo moved past him and into the fading smell of scented candles and the perfect minimal Feng Shui that was Jeremy’s two-level loft apartment. “You aren’t trying to further trap me into some kind of indentured servitude with your generous offers of food and fire water, are you?”

  “I also do have fire water.” Jeremy’s warm laugh was as genuine as a pair of jeans broken in over the course of decades. “You know, Jo, when I bought that Big Gulp for you at seven-eleven I wasn’t trying to bring you down into bondage.”

  “Yeah, but I pay my debts…”

  “Firstly: Clearly you don’t.” Jeremy chided, “And secondly, I told you I don’t want you to pay me back. A Big Gulp isn’t an extravagant gift, Jo.”

  “Super big gulp.” Jo corrected, smiling. She really did like to spend time with Jeremy… she hadn’t thought about any of the unpleasant surprises of the evening since she’d seen him… but then she was thinking about it now, and it hadn’t yet been two minutes… but still, that’s not bad, considering all the attempted murder and SMG-wielding paramilitary types… Jo took a deep breath and tried to uncrazy as best as she could. Breathe in the good, she thought, breathe out the neuroses.

  “Something wrong, Jo?” Jeremy touched her elbow, “You just had a serious moment there in the middle of our banter.”

  “I’ve… had a night.” Jo hedged, “Do you have some water? I’m parched… I just ran here from the Clark/Lake blue line station…”

  “You what?” Jeremy gave her an oblique look, as if she’d just said she’d been raised by kittens or something. “You just jogged all the way across the Loop… in that outfit?” He gestured to her everyday work clothes.

  “My monogrammed purple sweatsuit is at the cleaners.” She gave him a look, “And I said ‘run’ not ‘jog’, though I really should have said ‘sprint’. Turns out I enjoy running a lot, by the way. I never knew.”

  Jeremy’s quizzical look persisted, “That’s like two miles, Jo.”

  She shrugged, “And I didn’t really sprint so much across the loop as through the Blue Line tunnel.” She nodded at his double-take. “Yeah… long story, like I said—it’s been an eventful night.”

  “You’re serious?” He scrutinized Jo’s earnest nod, then continued, “Wow. This I’ve gotta hear… Tell you what, you just make yourself comfortable…” he waved her to a large, expensive-looking leather couch, “and I’ll get you some water. Hey, you hungry? I’ve got some leftover pasta—even a bit of Chinese that has not yet risen through long evolution into sentience… hey, you want to order something?”

  “Just the water, thanks.” Jo said, but now that the anxiety had largely faded, she was ravenous.

  “Nonsense!” he pronounced, noticing her pensive look. He grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator, “You must be starving… and if there’s one thing my Italian mom taught me, it’s how to force food on guests…even if it is…” he made a show of looking at his watch, “almost midnight.”

  “Uh, sorry to wake you up so late…” Jo fumbled, taking the water as Jeremy sat next to her on the couch.

  “What? Are you kidding? Jo. Seriously. I’m ecstatic you’re here! I was beginning to think I’d never see you again.” He seemed to realize that was a bit too earnest, so he lightened it with, “You realize, this is not the normal pattern for me.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you’re a heartbreaker.” Jo tried to keep closer to sipping than chugging the water and largely succeeded.

  “So, what are you in the mood for?”

  “Distraction.”

  “Food is distracting…”

  “Uh… ok, what are you in the mood for?” Jo tried not to sound too eager, failed, went for levity, “But I don’t have my wallet… uh… maybe you could loan me a bit more money?”

  “Jo, in all seriousness… you are ridiculous.”

  “I know, I’m a bit conscious of you always paying for me…”

  “No, I mean your poor credit rating simply does not warrant further loans.”

  She winced a bit, but he caught her eye and gave her that winning smile. “There’s an all-night pizza place that delivers… they’re pretty good.”

  She nodded, “Okay. Nothing we
ird though… no fish or fruit.”

  “I’ll make the call.”

  ***

  The boom was like being kicked in the soul. It was a sound she’d heard literally thousands of times before—a sound she’d caused thousands of times—but hearing it being made by a gun pointed at her face, well that was different. It felt like the universe had collapsed in on her from every angle, forcing all the blood from her extremities and into her stuttering heart, which seemed to be clenched as tight as a fist. Her vision flashed with a single lightning strike of purple/black as the boom from the pistol seemed to lengthen and fill the universe.

  Jackie didn’t have the dexterity to stumble, so after the initial flinch, which had consumed every muscle, she stood in shocked silence.

  “Do I seem like I’m for real?” A man’s voice asked near at hand. The voice wasn’t excited or hard, it was more passively ironic than sarcastic.

  Then it all unwound. Jackie’s consciousness seemed to unclench and re-emerge from the inner, near unconscious cocoon where the bolt of unexpected fear and surprise had driven her. Her eyes opened, and after a bit of blinking focused first on the compact 9mm gun pointing at the bridge of her nose, then on the earnest, scarred face of the priest.

  “Oh yeah, very real.” She tried to say, but her voice hadn’t yet returned to her, so her lips moved unintelligibly.

  “Just breathe, Miss.” The stranger said helpfully, “Clearly if I wanted you dead, we wouldn’t be having this pleasant chat. Now, I trust we can dispense with the distractions and have a clear, frank discussion, as I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

  Jackie disengaged the death grip her autonomic nervous system had put on her throat and blew out a long, ragged breath. “Fair… fair enough.” She managed.