Hard Fall

by Ridley Pearson

  It’s a bum. A fucking half-naked street bum holding a match out as lighting.

  The footfalls continue deeper into the darkness.

  Daggett stuffs the gun away and hurries off. He had come within a split second of killing that bum. His nerves are raw. He picks up his speed. He’s losing Kort.

  He passes an area that smells of urine and excrement. He doesn’t stop because he can still hear Kort running in the distance.

  The next time he stops, the footfalls are gone.

  It is not exactly silence. He can hear a train. Ahead of him? Behind? He’s not sure. But no footfalls. He creeps forward cautiously, his gun back out and held in both hands. The grayness of image has returned: his eyes have adjusted. But it is no form of light. It is more a mosaic of hard shapes and vague edges. It is the crunching of dirt under his feet and the whine of that train, which is clearly growing closer.

  The face shoots out from behind a black rectangle, and he is knocked entirely off his feet. His gun fires as he falls. He sees a bright yellow flash and realizes it was not his gun, but a gun being fired at him. He rolls inside the tracks, well aware of the existence of a third rail carrying enough electricity to turn him to dust. He rolls and he rolls. He hears two more rounds.

  The earth begins to shake beneath him. The train is coming. The train! He explodes to his feet and charges off into the darkness, which, thanks to the approaching train, is growing ever more light. The tunnel continues its curve to the left. At a full run now, he catches up to the ever elusive image of Kort’s back as he continues to fade around the huge curve. Like a sterile sunrise, a brightness fills the tunnel until Daggett is nearly blind with white light. He’s lost him. One moment seen, the next, gone. He stops. Chest heaving. Hand held to block the approaching light, his face retained in shadow. He’s terrified. The sound is overpowering. He wants to scream. The train barrels down on him.

  At the last possible second, only yards in front of him, Kort breaks from the shadows and dives to clear the train. It is meant to be perfect timing. But he catches a foot … something wrong … he falls … An image—that is all. A black blur in silhouette met by the stark white light and charging roar of several tons of train.

  Daggett screams, “No-o-o-o-o-o!” But it is too late. The impact is instant, and he’s showered in a spray of blood and flesh that soaks him through.

  When he awakens by the side of the tracks, he is overcome by the sticky goo and the stench. He pulls himself out of his blood-soaked clothes as quickly as they will come off. Stripped down to shorts and shoes, his eyes wiped clear, he staggers, feeble-legged, down the tracks, toward the ever-increasing sound of the army of approaching footfalls. Kort is dead; he feels victorious. But he has not won. Where is Duncan? How will they ever find Duncan without Kort alive?

  His tears run red with another man’s blood.

  34

  * * *

  Carrie Stevenson slept poorly. Not only did she worry for Cam, but she hated him, hated herself, hated everything. She had been tempted by the apple and now found its juices poison. Her tryst with Carl, which had brought her so much immediate happiness, had delivered a devastating aftershock of sorrow and regret. She reverberated from that aftershock, her entire body trembling as she wept openly for hours on end, lying naked in a bedroom too hot to permit sleep. Her blood was tainted with remorse so tangible that her own body odor disgusted her: she smelled of him.

  Worming around inside her was the humiliation of his silence. She had given herself fully to him—the things they had done!—and then she had paid with the heart-wrenching impatience of sitting by a phone that brought nothing but silence all day. He had vanished from her life, replaced by a despondent Cam whom she realized she loved with all her heart. She had ruined everything.

  Adding to her confusion was the discovery, not five minutes earlier, that someone had rearranged her keys. She kept all the teeth to her keys facing the same direction, except Cam’s, which made it easy to spot in the bunch. Now its teeth were facing the same way as all the others. That was wrong. That was impossible, unless that key had been removed and later replaced. By someone else. Someone other than her. A single memory played repeatedly in her mind: She saw herself lying in bed, warm and feeling delicious, as she handed Carl her keys so he could buy them some take-out.

  One of the major fallacies of this campaign for truth was that she forced herself to relive memories so vital and fresh, so stimulating, that she caused herself an enormous amount of sorrow and grief. She also reminded herself just how wonderful those few days with Carl had been. Each house at which she arrived sparked a memory of a moment, or a turn of phrase, or a certain look of his, and by the third house he completely dominated her thoughts again. Twice she had to pull the car off the road to complete her crying without risking a traffic accident.

  The list of properties remained at her side, the names checked off one by one as she returned to them. If she was anything, she was efficient. Memory by memory she traveled back in time, smiling to herself, then frowning, then lighting a cigarette and attempting to smoke herself to death.

  She wandered the gardens, sat in the same chairs in which they had sat, recalled their discussions. She missed him. He had brought diversion to her life; he had taken her away without her going anywhere. A marvelous gift. And what she had thought might require two hours at most stretched on into the afternoon as she unknowingly delayed herself with these detours into sentimentality.

  A few minutes before five, having come away empty-handed, depressed and alone, she checked back in at the office finding only phone messages of no substance. The hollowness of her defeat turned her strong voice to a whisper and her rigid posture to that of an old woman. Sheila told her to go home, and so she did.

  It was only as she returned to her home on the subdivided estate that she remembered having shown Carl the gatehouse. It wasn’t much of a place, which is why she didn’t list it with her company, and rarely showed it, unless the owners, who lived in one of the master house’s segmented condominiums, asked her to. But when things had begun warming up with Carl, driven by a girlish impulse to have him living close by, she had shown him the property, entering from the southern entrance and making no reference to its relative proximity to her own residence.

  She parked her car in the garage, walked to the door of her carriage house, and then, changing her mind, set off through the dense copse of trees along a path that once had been the main road into the estate. Lined with towering maples, the road itself was now overgrown with bramble and other wild shrubs, the only way through it an aimlessly twisting game path cut by the few deer who also made their home here. Miraculously, for the sake of good footing, this game path followed the estate’s former driveway. Carrie plunged herself into the insects and the sudden darkness of the forest, and made her way as quickly as she could.

  A new section of driveway had been established at a right angle to the short stretch of the old road that remained in use. Because of this obstruction, the deer had steered clear of the new road, and so their path weaved toward the back of the former gatehouse. And so, too, did Carrie. Forced off the trail in order to reach the small clearing that held the cabin, she forged a path of her own, steering clear of the bramble with its razor-sharp teeth, and avoiding the dead fallen limbs as best as possible.

  It was a beautiful place, really, when you considered the privacy and quiet that resulted from its isolation. Had they invested a little more into the remodel, increasing the size or improving the one bathroom and tiny kitchenette, she might have unloaded it in a minute. As it was, it just didn’t have a market.

  But it had a broken window.

  That was new. Panic overcame her. Someone had broken in! She had been here not five days ago with Carl, and there had been no broken window at that time. Should she run back and call Cam and try to explain that a window was broken in one of her rentals and that he had better come quick? She was being childish. Vandalism was the likely explanation. Th
is fit the exact description of what was believed to be local teenager activity—kids breaking into homes hoping to find a bottle of booze, or a bed in which to screw. The village weekly had been full of such reports this summer, with the recently past Labor Day weekend being the worst. As property manager, she had an obligation to report any damage to the owners. She would therefore have to assess the damage.

  She stayed out of sight, debating her options. Call Cam, or just go take a look? She stirred with anger, disgusted that anyone would violate private property in this way. She stirred with fear that it might not be teenagers at all.

  She slipped quickly into the backyard and sneaked up to the back door, where she paused, ears alert for the slightest of sounds. She couldn’t hear anything above the drumming of her heart. Her emotions swung alternately between childish terror and adult anger. She didn’t know which to trust. It seemed so silly, this broken window. It seemed so terrifying.

  She turned the doorknob and pushed.

  She stepped inside the closet-sized kitchen and paused, because as she attempted to step over the window’s broken glass, she found, to her surprise, that it had been swept up. She had never known her heart to beat this strongly. There was the faint smell of cooked food where there should be none. Squatters? she thought. Or Carl? Fear overcame her. She understood nothing of her own actions. Rather than flee, she found herself drawn into this place, drawn into its mystery. Compelled to continue. She found herself well into the small house and continuing, step by quiet step.

  And then she froze. A brand-new shiny padlock and latch were crudely affixed to the study door. It was the cabin’s only room besides the small bedroom and the bath, which communicated with both. A maternal instinct, to which she had no biological claim, seized her nonetheless and, looking left and then right, she placed her hand gently on the door as might a psychic trying to draw energy from it. “Duncan?” she whispered into the crack.

  The excited but terrified voice that answered her, wordless and vague, as heard through the thickness of the door, high-pitched and frantic, cut through to the very core of her being. It was him.

  Wildly uncontrolled, she instinctively grabbed hold of the door’s handle and pushed it ferociously. The door banged open, stopped by the padlock, revealing a space of less than an inch, and beyond it, propped up on the floor with his dead legs dragging behind him, was Duncan, coming at her as quickly as those arms would carry him.

  It was only at the last possible second that she saw the woman to her right, and in that fraction of time managed to spin quickly and push shut the bedroom door, through which this woman was coming. The woman jumped back, but the door caught her forearm in its vise, and bounced back as if it had hit a rubber stop. The woman shrieked in pain.

  “Carrie! Carrie! Carrie!” Duncan screamed from his jail. But Carrie barely heard him, frantic with fear, her full attention on the hand that protruded from the door against which both women were now applying their full strength. The damaged arm forced itself farther into the door like a lever, and Carrie found herself losing ground. Without thinking about it, for having thought about it she never could have done it, she reached up, took hold of this woman’s smallest finger and pulled it sideways, applying enough pain to drive the arm back the other way through the crack in the door, and provoking another outburst of suffering from whom it belonged. Finally, her pressure on the door proved painful enough to cause this limb a farther retreat. Then, with the other’s arm caught at the wrist, Carrie placed both her hands against the door and walked her feet back, angling her body increasingly more steeply, inflicting even more weight against that wrist while, at the same time, moving the toe of her right shoe within inches of a cane chair that sat in the hallway beneath a set of coat pegs. It wouldn’t do to allow that hand to escape. This building had a front door as well, and all that kept her and Duncan’s keeper from each other was the fact that this woman’s arm was pinned by this door. Stretch as she did, her foot tended to push the chair away from her, not bring it closer. Lower and lower she drew herself to the ground, the bumping from the other side, the shrieks of horror and Duncan’s plaintive wailing, all conspiring against her. As if by a miracle, her toe finally caught the leg of the cane chair and slowly, inch by inch, she dragged it toward her.

  Her heart hammered wildly in her chest; she was shaking with fear. She walked her weight up the door again, rotated her back to it and body-blocked it with such determination, such authority, that she actually heard bones break. In that instant of what had to be inexplicable pain, she withdrew her weight, wedged the chair beneath the handle and banged it convincingly into place, trapping the wrist there.

  Tears blurred her vision, and doubt haunted her. Would it hold? “Carrie!” Duncan pleaded, his small fingers having hooked through the open crack.

  “Get back,” she said, continuing to support the chair’s leverage on the door with her weight. The fingers on the end of the woman’s hand, as red as any she had ever seen, twitched behind the owner’s attempts at freedom. Testing the chair’s wedged ability to contain the hand, Carrie slowly removed her weight until left completely alone. “Get back,” she repeated, screaming it loudly. “Hurry!” she scolded, as she saw the chair buckling behind the repeated bumps of the woman on the other side, and that hand began to move in the crack in the door. Duncan scrambled back, his twisted feet dragged lifeless behind him.

  She threw her shoulder into the door and heard the distinct sound of tearing wood as the screws pulled loose. Again and again she delivered her shoulder into it, her back to the kitchen, her eyes on that chair and the hand that gained movement with every bump of the adjacent door. She could actually feel Duncan’s door giving behind her efforts—the door was coming open! A piece of the doorjamb splintered and what had been an inch of space became two. The progress elated her, and briefly her tears ran clear of her eyes, restoring her vision.

  Her shoulder bruised by the pounding she delivered, Carrie risked ignoring the woman’s hand and the chair, and switched to her unused shoulder, spinning fully around. And then she gasped, and stopped altogether, her voice useless, her head reeling.

  There, blocking the doorway to the kitchen, hands clenched into fists, his eyes wide with disbelief, stood Carl.

  35

  * * *

  Daggett woke up at one o’clock in the afternoon, in his own bed, with no recollection of how he had gotten there. The sun outside his window was that intense September auburn light that was faithful to the approach of autumn. The dry throat and sluggish headache refreshed his memory—he’d been driven here in Pullman’s car, another agent driving his, where a Bureau doctor had prescribed a pair of sedatives intended to help him through what at the time was being described alternately as trauma and shock. After everyone had left him, he had chased down one of the sedatives with a stiff Scotch, and that, no doubt, had proved his downfall.

  He remembered having showered to wash off the blood and then having bathed in incredibly hot water, hoping unreasonably he might sterilize his skin. With a few refills from the hot-water spigot, that bath had taken the better part of an hour. His combined medications were getting the best of him by the time he hoisted himself out of the tub using Duncan’s trapeze, and lowered his head to the pillow at 3:00 A.M.

  He started coffee, showered again, and dressed in clean clothes, welcoming their fresh scent—indeed, worshiping it, as corny as a television ad. When two cups of coffee failed to jump-start him, he tried scrambled eggs, but only managed to eat half of them. Weary, feeling toxic and hung over, he climbed into his car and headed into work.

  He was greeted by those at Buzzard Point with a sailor’s reception. People he had not spoken with in ages appeared out of their office cubicles and shook his hand or slapped him on the back. “We’re gonna find the kid,” they all said in one form or another, and it became clear that the huge machinery of WMFO and all it represented had aligned itself to this single cause. “Michigan—this,” and “Michigan—that,”
he half expected to find himself at the head of a banquet table when he rounded the corner into the counterterrorism bullpen. Instead he found a room completely abandoned, except for Gloria, who burst into tears, and could not be understood as she attempted what amounted to condolences. In a vain attempt to quiet her, he embraced her for the first time in his life, a gesture that only served to push her farther over the edge.

  This was how Pullman found them, entwined in each other’s arms, Gloria sobbing hysterically. “They want you down in debriefing,” he said to Daggett with a captain’s ungraciousness. “And I want you back at your desk,” he said to Gloria.

  “Where is everybody?” Daggett asked with a sweeping gesture of his hand.

  “Every free agent in this field office with a good set of legs is out there on the street trying to scare up information on your boy or Cheysson. The general consensus here is that Cheysson is too secondary to attempt to carry this thing off without Kort, and with their infrastructure broken down because of the German raid, we assume whatever he had planned is dead in the water. All she can do now is run. We’re turning the heat up to blue flame. All of Cheysson’s co-workers at In-Flite are being subjected to the third degree: where she liked to vacation, where she might go if she was in trouble. We’re gonna find the kid, Daggett.”

  “How about my clothes? How about my letter jacket?”

  “Taken care of. Everything is taken care of. Now get down to debriefing and get ready to do your imitation of a broken record. You’re in for a long one.”

  “What about the initial reports? I’d like to read whatever we have on last night.”

  Pullman glanced at Gloria and then back at Daggett. “It isn’t going to work like that.”