Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  Army nurses know to hold a mortally wounded soldier’s hand. A small comfort, but no man wants to die alone. In the absence of better company, the vulture became a fixture, a companion, in Raszer’s dramatically reduced world. It perched with as much dignity as an ugly animal can, preened itself, and paused every so often in the midst of its toilet to cock its head at Raszer, not in a reproachful way, but as if to say, What do you make of me?

  In view of his experience with the peacock, Raszer half expected the buzzard to talk, maybe to engage in some great dialogue about truth and death. But the bird revealed nothing, and this was the thing that began to peck away at the tiny egg of spiritual fortitude Raszer had left.

  If God would not grant him a talking bird, even at death’s door, then maybe the jig was up. If there was to be no illumination at the end, then maybe there had never been light. Pain can take a man’s mind to such places. But what finally pierced the last membrane of spirit was an idiot’s epiphany about why the vulture had kept him patient company for so long, a realization that an ordinary man would have come to far earlier.

  It was going to eat him.

  The habit of coming to the ledge had undoubtedly been bred into the birds over centuries of seeing corpses hung out like suet for their consumption. The vulture was doing what it had always done: It was waiting for him to die.

  You’ll be waiting a long time, Raszer said without words.

  The bird looked him up and down, as if to say, Maybe not. You don’t look so good.

  Appearances can be deceiving, Raszer replied.

  Not to a scavenger, the bird seemed to answer. We know. In a single, practiced motion—as if casually plucking a grape from the recess of a vine—the vulture extended its long neck, thrust its open beak into Raszer’s right eye socket, and, with a shake of its head to loosen the sinews, removed his right eye.

  It sat for a moment with the organ held delicately in its beak, then swallowed it in one gulp.

  Raszer’s system immediately entered salvage mode. It hadn’t happened. No. It could not have. Delirium. Time could be reversed. Yes. Go back, go back. And if it had happened—if his right eye were in the vulture’s stomach—he would get it back, the way fishermen retrieve arms from sharks’ bellies.

  All these thoughts occurred as adrenaline coursed through his arteries and bootstrapped him into a panicked state. Fight or flight—only, he could do neither.

  He began to taste blood and feel wind in the orifice.

  As long as the bird remained there, sated and self-satisfied, Raszer’s sense of affront would grow. That, he couldn’t stomach. He braced, arched his back, and pumped out from the wall, swinging his legs up to the ledge and kicking furiously to dislodge the interloper. The vulture fought back, pecking his calves and feet, tearing off bits of flesh and fabric, but then, after brief battle, flapped its big wings twice and took off.

  For a few moments, Raszer’s bloodied feet rested on the ledge, his body in a strange hammock position. Then his heels slipped off the stone, and with a terrifying jerk and a creak of leather, he swung back to a dangling stop. Through the clouded lens of his left eye, he saw that a party of armed men was ascending the path to the fortress gates and appeared to be flanking a prisoner. The summit of the path was about thirty feet to his right, and level with the position of the spike that held him to the wall.

  Once his remaining eye had cleared and focused, he saw that the armed men were the Green River officer and his posse, and that their captive was Dante.

  And this was when the draining of Raszer’s hope became a hemorrhage. Not the merciful flow from the cutting of a major artery, leading quickly to unconsciousness and death, but the steady oozing from a thousand small internal cuts.

  Dante. In the space of a four-day trek, this highlands Huck Finn, with his skinny body and nest of golden hair, had become for Raszer a counterweight to the anomie of the Scotty Darrells and Henry Lees of the world. And during their climb of the north wall, something had passed between them that, once given, couldn’t be taken back.

  Dante’s wrists were shackled, and he looked to have been beaten around the face. The American had him by the arm, and pulled him roughly to the edge of the path, where the slope raked steeply down to the floor of the canyon. Dante’s face creased in sympathy as he looked on Raszer, half-dead and half-blind. His lips began to form words. A repeated phrase, something he wanted Raszer to know. It’s over? No, not that. It’s okay? Almost. No. She’s okay. She’s okay.

  The commander pressed the muzzle of his pistol to the back of Dante’s skull, fired once, and shoved the body over the edge. He wiped his hands on his cavalry-blue trousers, parked them on his hips, and gave Raszer a nod.

  The most awful thing of all was that Raszer couldn’t summon a response.

  None of this enterprise had been remotely worth its price in grief. None of it. One girl might have been pulled from the wreckage, but another had crashed and made the tally a net zero. Three people—all of whom Raszer might have treasured as friends—were dead. Scotty Darrell was dead. And the beast roared. Fuck it.

  So he hung his head, and he wept. From the eye came tears, and from the empty pocket of flesh came blood, mixing as they ran over his lips. His body jerked and heaved as he was wracked with a grief that came in bolts from the center of his belly. Raszer didn’t pray for death—that wasn’t in his repertoire. What he prayed for, and finally cried out for, was to be known to someone, and, in being known, to have worth.

  For a long time, it was very quiet. He didn’t let his eyelid drop, because there was no longer any comfort in darkness, or any point in trying to concentrate his will. Instead, he kept his good eye on Dante’s corpse, believing that somehow his vigil would keep the scavenging birds away. The feeling had left his shoulders and hands, and he knew that was a bad sign. It became apparent to him that he was going to die soon.

  What was that, again? It became apparent to him that he was going to die. Yes, that was it. Simple enough. So why did the two pronouns contained in that thought not seem to refer to the same person? The object was clearly the man hanging from an iron spike. The subject, to whom this man’s imminent death was apparent, occupied another country. It wasn’t a Cartesian split; to oppose mind and matter presumes that both occupy the same pocket of existence, but separately. What was flickering like a discharged neon sign in front of Raszer’s eye was the consubstantiality of two worlds.

  The feeling couldn’t be caught and held down for examination. Not when pain was present. When he tried, it went away, and he was left with only a poor description of it. He knew that it must be related to the inverted vision he’d acquired in the grove, and to the sense of displacement he’d had since Iskenderun. He knew that what Chrétien and Dante had told him about the advanced levels of Gauntlet play somehow described who and where he was. He just had no idea where to go with it.

  He, of course, didn’t need to go anywhere. Anywhere came to him.

  Raszer felt warmth and gentle pressure against his midsection. The strain on his arms was suddenly relieved, and for a time, keeping his heels on the wall required no effort. He shifted his focus from the rocky slope to the space immediately in front of him, and found that he was in the embrace of a small but evidently very sturdy female person wearing a Mongolian herdsman’s wool cap. Her breasts were against his breast and her hips were against his hips, and as she had come from nowhere and was managing this feat while holding on to nothing, he figured her for a phantom.

  Shit, he thought. It’s the angel of death. Has it happened already? So fast?

  “Shhh,” she said. “Don’t talk crazy. I told you you’d see me again.”

  “Shams?”

  “Shams I am.”

  “Where’d you come from?”

  She looked up at Raszer, and he saw all the beauty of the man in a woman’s face.

  “Do something for me,” she said. “Look west, toward home. Just beyond the three jagged peaks—only, when you see the peaks, see
them on the inside.”

  When he did as she had told him, he felt the pressure and piercing sensation in the iris of his left eye that always preceded the light. When it broke through, it flared momentarily, and only after his monocular vision had stabilized did he see the city. Its outline was familiar, for it was the same one he’d seen at the Kurdish wedding in Ispiria. Its brightness was as great compared with the day’s as the day’s was with the night’s.

  “Na-Koja-Abad,” he whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “Nowhere-Land.”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I going?”

  “You’re already there,” the angel said, and slipped from his body like a sheet.

  A shadow fell across the face of the rock. Something large and looming. Raszer looked up, but the glare from the object’s corona was too intense. A beating of wings. The air made waves against his eardrums. “Fuck,” he said out loud. The bird is back. Out of the way, you motherfucker. Just let me see the city again. Let me see . . .

  “Hang on,” said a male voice from above. “We’ll get as close as we can and send a man down for you.”

  The helicopter was black as a raven, and its familiar dreadlocked pilot was only a few shades lighter. In the open bay, holding a megaphone, squatted Rashid al Khidr, and over his shoulder, Raszer thought he might have spotted the second Mr. Greenstreet. A third man in a harness was preparing to lower a rescue cable. In the cabin’s rear and in shadow, Raszer saw the outline of two forms, one female and one canine. The chopper tipped and veered, its blades slicing precariously close to the cliffside. A burst of automatic-weapon fire issued from the fortress wall, forty feet above.

  A second flying gunship, as black as the first and similarly unmarked, dropped down—seemingly from nowhere—and returned the fire, peppering the parapets with machine-gun bursts and raining stone dust on Raszer’s head. The chopper carrying Rashid and Francesca dove steeply to evade the barrage.

  “Give us a minute!” Rashid called out. “We are expecting help.”

  There was a great grinding of steel, and to Raszer’s right, the forward gates of the fortress began to retract. The guards emerged in pairs, occupying both sides of the land bridge and immediately directing a volley at the helicopters. The gunship ascended and returned fire, while the rescue chopper repositioned itself for a second attempt.

  Up the steep sides of the bridge streamed Mam Rahim’s hill fighters, blasting as they ran, alternatively diving behind small boulders and rising to get off another round. It was exactly the kind of fight they’d trained a thousand years for. When he heard fire and shouts from the west side of the slope as well, Raszer knew that the pesh merga must have come at the gates from both sides.

  Caught between the fusillade from above and the Kurdish crossfire from below, El Mirai’s forces were temporarily neutralized, and the rescue chopper was finally able to get its harnessed man lowered into place, about forty-eight inches from Raszer’s limp form. Raszer looked into the face of his rescuer and saw a young Special Forces officer of twenty-six or twenty-seven, square-jawed and resolute but worried underneath.

  He looped the harness under Raszer’s arms and had begun to thread it between his legs when a burst of fire came at them from below and chipped away the rock just overhead. Hurriedly, the young soldier dropped the loose end, removed his knife, sliced through the leather strap, and pulled Raszer’s body against his, shouting, “Go!” to the men above. Raszer’s arms remained extended above his head for a moment, as if unable to accept their release. Then they dropped limply around the soldier’s neck. The chopper pulled rapidly away from the wall in an almost perfectly lateral maneuver, and carried its dangling catch to a gentler slope before attempting to reel it back in.

  A bullet passed his right ear.

  “Shit!” the soldier shouted. He shook the cable and yelled “C’mon!” to accelerate their ascent, but Raszer only saw his lips mouth the word.

  But the helicopter was under fire, too, and could not orient itself. The pilot began to pull away from the barrage. A second bullet fired from almost directly below grazed Raszer’s ribs and buried itself in the soldier’s chest. He saw the soldier blink twice before a helpless expression covered his paling face and his grip weakened.

  The chopper dropped precariously and veered toward the canyon. Twenty feet below, in the eye of the melee, the American took aim again. An instant before he pulled the trigger, Raszer slipped through the half-engaged harness and dropped to the slope. He heard more than felt his kneecap crack against rock.

  There was a cry from above, and Raszer looked up to see the underbelly of the wolfhound known as Shaykh Adi as he leapt from the open bay. On the dog’s heels came Francesca, briefly restrained by Rashid until gravity got the better of his grip on the girl. He did not hear or see either of them land. The chopper tilted, its engines howling and its runners scraping stone. The sound of gunfire rose in escalating waves, and the propeller blades beat the air around Raszer’s ears into a thick foam of noise.

  Then, suddenly, the air stilled.

  The rescue helicopter withdrew, and the gunship dropped into its place, its fire pinging the iron gates of the fortress. From the parapets above, a small antiaircraft missile was launched, and the gunship tilted at what seemed an impossible angle. Below, the American mercenary took dead aim at its pilot. Raszer crouched beside a boulder, his damaged kneecap pulled up to his chest. He was out of the firestorm, but it wouldn’t matter if the chopper crashed. None of them would get out alive.

  The mercenary was eighteen feet up the steep slope from where he hid. Raszer searched the ground for a rock large enough throw him off his aim but small enough to hurl with his wracked arms. He had it in hand when his enemy fixed the target.

  The American never got the shot off.

  From the far side of the land bridge came a blur of raven-black hair and blue eyes. In the time it takes to say goodbye, Mam Rahim had cut the mercenary’s throat from ear to ear.

  Raszer rose slowly and painfully to his feet. Not a centimeter of his flesh was free of pain, but as far as he was able to determine through the screen of shock, nothing was broken. He looked around for Francesca. The firefight had been pushed west by the Kurdish forces, who were evidently trying to create a safe zone for the rescue chopper to make another attempt.

  That was—or should be—good news, he reasoned. Could he let himself think so? He tried to straighten his spine, but his entire frame had been torqued out of shape. The wisest thing to do under the circumstances was to find Francesca, seek cover, and wait it out. A small avalanche of stone skittered past his feet. He looked up.

  What he saw robbed him of what little breath he had.

  Poor Emmett Parrish had painted a stripe on his bedroom wall to protect him from the egregore conjured from Henry Lee’s little rock. But Raszer did not have so much as a piece of chalk. There was a shriek, and then there was only the wind.

  It materialized as air and dust in cyclonic motion. A dust devil. But even at first glance, there was more. Its white-noise roar swallowed all other sounds. It had a shape, and the shape impelled it to move from side to side, like a dancer. An electrical storm seemed to rage at its center. It descended the slope, moving toward Raszer, and enveloped him in a matter of seconds. Just before that, he caught a fleeting glimpse of Francesca and the dog. Immediately, they became a memory no more real than myth.

  He was in the eye of the twister. It was absolutely quiet, and absolute quiet—like total darkness—is a terrifying absence filled with the whispers of ghosts and gods. He looked up toward the mouth of the funnel and saw a face as passive as that of a sphinx. Lips parted, and lightning flashed. Current streamed down the cone. After the glare subsided, the lips had become a crack, and through that crack was the end of the world.

  Rashid had called it the nunc—the gap between form and substance.

  The place where things get lost and never found.

  Raszer felt his feet leave the ground
as his body began a slow, spinning ascent. The interior walls of the vortex became walls of flesh, yielding as he approached the mouth. He gasped for breath. The cyclone had sucked all the air out of him.

  “You can still choose me,” he heard her say from all directions.

  “Not in a million years,” he answered. “Let me go so I can kill you.”

  His feet suddenly hit the ground, and he fell to his damaged knee. There was a great weight on him, and no air in his lungs. He staggered to his feet and lurched left and right, trying to dislodge the parasite from his back. Her arm was at his throat, a leg coiled around his midsection. He couldn’t see the face, but he knew from the scent that Layla Faj-Ta’wil had emerged intact from the vortex. He peeled her fingers from his neck for long enough to swallow a gulp of air and asked, “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m the one who knows you,” she answered. “I’m the one who wants you.”

  For a frightening instant, it felt good to be wanted that badly. Then he said, “I’m not available.”