An Artifact of Death

by Anna Philpot

  “I’d like you to tell me more about the actual position and what, exactly, you plan to offer me in the form of a compensation package.”

  7

  Cici

  Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.― Confucius

  No, that wasn’t a scary moment at all. Cici grumbled, trying to calm her racing heart. But the idea of her having to die because she knew Anton’s identity…that proved terrifying.

  Anton-who-was-so-not-Anton emptied his pockets, going through his meager possessions. Most of which seemed to mainly be made up of guns, ammunition, and knives.

  She managed to keep her mouth shut but, in her head, she was screaming, I’m totally not okay with this!

  This guy made Sam look like a freaking hug counselor. She’d met one a couple of years ago in Boston. The man’s whole job seemed to consist of giving hugs to people. Cici had admitted, more than once, that being a hug counselor had serious potential.

  Sam wouldn’t be good at it, though. His cool blue-gray eyes remained filled with shadows that told everyone he’d seen and interacted with some of the worst of humanity—and maybe committed some atrocities just as horrible. But this Anton guy’s eyes were flat, emotionless, and scarier than anything Cici had witnessed before.

  Plus, Cici had seen Sam in action, taking down criminals, enough to know he was a badass, which made Anton-something even more action-movie-hero-like.

  What, exactly? She couldn’t fathom. Well, she was dazed thanks to being shot at—again. And running for her life—again.

  Three times in a year.

  That must be a record in terrible luck. Unless…no, she couldn’t let her mind go there. That possibility was too heinous to consider.

  Cici took one long moment to close her eyes and yell lots of cuss words. Silently, in her mind. Because she did not want to be in this situation, but she was still a reverend—and reverends did not out-curse a Boston-bred spy, no matter how bad the situation. There was probably a bible verse on that somewhere, but Cici couldn’t use the mental energy to think up an appropriate quote.

  Opening her eyes, she slid off her pack and went through its meager contents.

  Anton eyed the small pile of trail mix, a couple of apples, oranges, granola bars and a windbreaker.

  “Do you know how to shoot a gun?” Anton asked, holding out a pistol.

  Cici looked at the weapon with distaste. “I doubt it.” When Anton opened his mouth to speak, Cici raised her hand. “It’s not as though I spend much of my time shooting things. I spend my time these days talking about loving creation, loving each other.”

  “Then I guess I should keep this to myself.” Anton shoved it in the waistband of his pants.

  “Um,” Cici said, mostly under her breath.

  “Would you like it?”

  Cici’s hand fluttered out. She didn’t want it. But not wanting it and not taking a means to protect herself were vastly different—especially here in this current situation good ol’ Anton had thrust her into when he’d jumped into her car.

  She licked her lips. “I…I guess…maybe…” She sighed.

  He raised an eyebrow, but Cici couldn’t get any other words to push past her lips.

  Anton pulled the pistol back out from his waistband and offered it to Cici, turning it so that the barrel faced toward the car’s windshield.

  “I already have three. Keep it. You might decide that it’s worth taking his life as opposed to losing your own.”

  Cici accepted the gun with a tentative grip, staring at it hard. Anton smiled, but it was without humor. Cici checked the gun with a great deal of hesitancy. The safety was on. She sighed with relief.

  “It’s not going to shoot you just because you’re holding it up,” he said, his voice drier than the Chaco Canyon air.

  Cici lifted the pistol and sighted down the barrel, using both hands to steady it, just as she would were she to fire it.

  “You’ve held a weapon, fired one before.” Anton’s voice held a twinge of surprise—an uncommon occurrence, Cici would bet. She couldn’t help the smugness that crept up her chest.

  “I’m from New Mexico. There used to be a program through fish and wildlife to teach kids weapon safety. Both guns and bows. My dad made my sister and me take it each year from the time we were eight until we were thirteen.”

  “Really?” Anton’s expression infused with shock, then admiration. He glanced around, his gaze bouncing from cholla to juniper. “Strange world out here,” he muttered.

  Cici snorted. “Well, I never liked that class. And I don’t want anything to do with this,” Cici muttered. But she took the gun. Her stomach did a slow, queasy flip as she slid it into the side pouch of her hiking pants. She held out her hand and Anton stared at it for a moment. He pulled out a handful of ammunition—nine-millimeter, thank goodness—and dropped it into Cici’s outstretched palm.

  “What do you mean?”

  Cici waved toward the weapon in her pocket, but her gaze drifted toward the ruins they’d left behind. “Any of this. Guns. Being scared. Shooting. Death. Pain.”

  Anton gazed at her, his dark eyes filled with a secret she could never understand. “I hope you don’t have to. But if it comes down to not hurting them or ensuring that our way of life persists, make the right choice. The one that keeps you alive.”

  “So, are you saying that you do work for the American government?” Cici asked raising her eyebrows.

  Anton shook his head, but his lips quirked up a little in a rueful hint of humor, and his eyes warmed a touch so they weren’t completely deadened. “You don’t know when to quit.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Cici scoffed.

  “I say that like a man who’s been in a position for strategic retreats more than once,” Anton replied, his voice dry. “You have to understand—the less you know, the less risk you are to them.”

  “You believe that?” Cici asked, her voice soft.

  Anton stared at her for a long moment. “I know it. Got anything else?”

  “I keep a SAR pack in my trunk.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Search and rescue. It’s designed to help a person survive in the elements for about three days.”

  “Grab it, and let’s hope that’s enough supplies and time,” Anton said. He reloaded the magazine of his gun and ensured a bullet was in the chamber.

  Cici scrambled to put her food and water back in her pack and zipper it closed before following Anton out of her car. She clambered over the gear shift, cursing the cockpit design when her pack caught on the dashboard or ceiling. She wasn’t sure which. Mainly, she feared the gun would go off somehow and shoot her in the foot.

  She exited her vehicle, shutting the car door with more care than she usually exhibited. Cici rounded the back bumper to the trunk, which she popped open. Anton whistled.

  “Good stuff in that pack, I bet. That’s professional.”

  “It is,” Cici said. “I’m a professional volunteer. I started back up again last week…” Because of her ankle injury. Cici wiggled her toes in her thick hiking boots, thankful to have both legs working.

  At Anton’s silence, she glanced up to find him staring at her, eyebrows raised in question. What had they been talking about? Right, search-and-rescue volunteering.

  “That means I’m willing to go out into the Santa Fe National Forest to search for missing or injured hikers or campers.”

  “You’ve done that?”

  Cici nodded.

  “Well, then. Perhaps I’m not so upset to have jumped in your car after all.”

  Cici was. She was planning to point that out when a large black Humvee-style vehicle raced down the road. Anton shoved her down beside her car, his body pressed close to hers, almost as if he was protecting her.

  Would he? She had no way to know. In the last twenty minutes—the entirety of their acquaintance—Anton lied to her and scared her. He drove her off the road and shoved her around.

  S
ure, Cici wallowed in self-pity and not just because Sam wasn’t acting the way she wanted him to. She missed her sister; she missed an attachment to others—intimacy and emotional closeness. Cici wanted to take steps to rectify the parts of her life that remained lacking, which was why she’d flown out to Portland two weekends ago, then come here to think through her future. That’s also why she struggled to focus on the task at hand.

  “Give me the pack,” Anton said, prying it out of her stiff fingers. “Come on. Move. Now.”

  She opened her eyes and did as Anton said. The large four-wheeler continued down the road, now nothing more than a dirt rooster tail in the distance. Anton pulled the straps over his shoulders, adjusting the length with quick efficient movements.

  “That’s sweep one. There should be a sweep two coming by soon. If they find your vehicle, then I’ll need to get them out of the way.”

  Cici pressed a hand to her queasy stomach even as she straightened her spine and kept her gaze pinpointed on the horizon, as her mother taught her to do years before.

  Nothing in her upper-middle-class upbringing or her years studying the Bible prepared her for this type of eat-or-be-eaten world in which she now found herself.

  Anton sprinted toward a taller outcropping. Cici followed.

  Cici’s years of rock climbing at both her universities and those few free hours after work in Boston and Santa Fe came in handy. Granted, the climbing caused a dull ache to flare in the ankle she’d banged up, but she managed.

  Anton muscled his way to the top well enough, but Cici doubted he spent much time training with actual rocks. He seemed to do fine identifying the handholds, but his muscles strained and shook more than they should because he didn’t take the time to balance his weight properly.

  If she made it out of this alive, Cici planned to look up the CIA website to see what they listed as part of spy duties. She frowned. Not the CIA website. It wouldn’t tell her much. Some other site that claimed expert knowledge of spy agency practices. Yeah, that’s where she’d go. And she’d bet rock climbing wasn’t listed.

  It should be. Especially if agents took cases in the arid, sparsely populated American West. Mountains and rough terrain outnumbered humans in many of this land’s square miles.

  Anton pulled himself up over the edge of the ridge and Cici waited for him to catch his breath. He pulled out a large water bottle from her SAR pack and drank once his chest stopped heaving.

  “What now, hotshot?” she asked.

  “Have you stopped to think maybe I’m actually the bad guy?” Anton asked, still huffing a little. He kept low to the ground, pulling Cici with him. Probably so they weren’t such stark outlines against the deep blue of the late afternoon sky. She winced as the tender skin of her elbow met with a sharp object.

  Yes, she had wondered if Anton was the villain in this scenario. That scared the spit and spine right out of her body. She locked gazes with him. Unfortunately, the deep darkness in his eyes seemed to go on indefinitely. Death, destruction of his soul, moral equivocation, even resentment and disappointment swirled upward—tiny glimpses better left unviewed.

  “You’ve hurt people—killed people,” Cici rasped.

  “I have,” Anton said, looking back at her without a hint of apology.

  “You’ll do it again,” Cici said, her voice trembling as the shivers overtook her. She clenched her fists, refusing to give in to the fright.

  His gaze turned harder, eyes glinting with a somber purpose. “In a heartbeat. For my country, for my people.”

  Cici unstuck her tongue from the dry roof of her mouth. Might as well ask—and get over the inevitable. “Are you?” she asked.

  “The bad guy? As far are you’re concerned, no.” He dipped his head down, toward her car and the large black Humvee that had driven past. “As far as they’re concerned, absolutely.”

  “All comparative,” Cici murmured. The sun had passed behind a thick, graying cloud, causing the temperature to drop a good ten, maybe fifteen degrees. Cici shivered and not because of the coolness against her skin.

  The idea of murder as protection caused Cici’s chest to ache, her mind to cry out to her sister. That place deep inside where they’d once shared space remained quiet, cold. Empty. Horrifying.

  Because death remained an easier path than dialogue. Cici read the Bible enough to know human nature remained unchanged—perhaps even unrestrained—over the last multiple millennia.

  “How can I trust you?” she asked, dragging her mind out of the mire of sadness and anger it plunged into with each thought of her twin’s death.

  “You shouldn’t trust anyone,” Anton said. “Ever.” He muttered so low, Cici wasn’t sure that last word was for her. “Except for someone with good taste in music.”

  “But…”

  He sighed as he motioned her forward. He hunted between the rocks and juniper, lying in one of the shadows. He inched his way closer to the edge.

  “Did you know about Tyminski before this album?” he asked.

  “Y-yes,” Cici gasped, her stomach gurgling in unhappiness as Anton searched for a good place to lay in wait. To shoot, maim, and kill the men following them.

  Because, as of today, this was Cici’s world.

  “I liked his song in O, Brother Where Art Thou?” she said.

  Anton wiggled farther forward, bracing his arms against a slight natural ridge between a large boulder and a low-hanging juniper. “Get in here, out of the sun.”

  The clouds shifted again. Though more angry, thick gray puffs looming on the horizon, the expanse overhead opened again, showing large patches of blue and the bright yellow Zia. Cici inched closer to Anton, deciding he’d had multiple opportunities to kill her or dump her with his enemies. While she might distrust his motives, Anton proved her best opportunity for continued survival.

  “A Coen Brothers movie buff, huh?”

  He wanted to have a conversation about movies now?

  “Um…”

  Anton dropped the SAR pack onto the ground next to his hip and began assembling something onto his pistol. Cici was so stunned at the speed with which his hands moved that she didn’t question him—probably for the best since he then laid down on his belly and took aim through what Cici assumed was a scope. She hadn’t known those were possible to add to anything other than a rifle.

  Maybe they weren’t to civilians, but already Cici understood Anton was much, much more than an average hiker. She’d hung out with Jeannette and Sam, after all. But this man upped the game when it came to his job and the people he knew. Big time.

  Cici wrapped her arms around her elbows, staring out over the valley below. The road intersected the wide expanse dotted with few cars and fewer, tiny human shapes in the shadowed distance of the ruins. The juniper’s tight needles wove dark green splashes that turned black the farther she looked. Cholla also dotted the landscape leading up to the purplish mountains hazed by afternoon heat and great distance.

  “I like that film, too,” Anton muttered. “Almost as much as Anchor Man. That movie helped me through a rough patch.” He glanced back, a quick flash of acknowledgment he’d shared something. Perhaps to him, he felt he had.

  She drank more water from her pack. A black stink bug crawled over her shoe. Anton checked his magazine and reclipped it into his handgun. She closed her eyes as he ensured a bullet fell into the chamber.

  He was ready—almost eager—for the seemingly inevitable coming of the bad guys.

  As if her thoughts brought them, another dust cloud filled the air from the direction of the visitor center—where she and Anton sped away from maybe an hour or so before.

  Anton motioned Cici in closer to him.

  “The trees offer some protection from their scopes and whatever else they’ll have. Probably high-tech gizmos. I need more equipment,” Anton muttered.

  Cici moved closer readily enough. It’s not like she had another, better plan to keep herself alive.

  He took a deep breath, held
it, and then released slowly.

  His eyes narrowed—not quite a squint—as the sound of an engine grew louder. He waited and Cici gulped, holding her breath, pressing her back against the rock where she leaned.

  Anton turned his gun. She assumed he was following the car with his eyes, but she was too lightheaded from the fear coursing through her to turn and see.

  His finger spasmed on the trigger—tightening enough to make Cici place her hands over her ears. Her eyes remained trained on the gun. She bit back her cry of denial, biting deep into the soft flesh of her lower lip on an effort to stay quiet. The metallic tang of blood filled her mouth, causing her stomach to slosh once again.

  Anton ignored her and her emotional struggle. Through her hands, she heard the slam of a car door, then another.

  The words spoken were deep—male—and accented. Anton took another deep breath, expanding his lungs, and then his finger flexed. Cici pressed her palms tight enough to her ears there’d be a pop there when she wanted to release the pressure.

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

  Seven tiny flashes from the barrel of his weapon.

  Anton leaped to his feet, grabbing the SAR pack and yanked her up, too. Cici glanced back, a fleeting look, to see the three men on the ground, blood pooling around their fallen bodies.

  Anton tugged her arm, harder this time, with an urgency she couldn’t ignore. Cici took off after him, sprinting over the top of the tall hill, her back cramping as she waited for the bullet sure to rip through her flesh.

  8

  Cici

  If what one has to say is not better than silence, then one should keep silent.― Confucius

  They half jogged, half speed-walked over the rough, rocky terrain, having to slow their pace when the slag caused their feet to slide out from under them. Cici focused on her hiking boots to ensure her body remained in alignment and she didn’t mess up her ankle again. Damn. She should have brought the brace the doctor suggested she continue to wear for another couple of weeks.