The Terminals

by Royce Scott Buckingham

  The street leading to the stadium was named Avenida Equatorial, and Ari informed them over the intercom that the Amazon River lay almost exactly on the equator. His commentary was interrupted a few blocks before they arrived at the stadium when he received a call. Ari quickly donned a headset and pulled to the side of the road. He listened and then summoned Cam.

  “Come help me with something.”

  They left the bus and walked to the rainforest banner decal. Ari picked at one corner, and it began to peel off.

  “Grab the other corner.”

  Cam helped him peel the entire banner, and then Ari told him to flip it over. The rest of the crew watched from the windows above. The reverse side read CALLI! in huge pink letters. Cam cocked his head.

  “Stick the decal back on, but with this side showing,” Ari instructed.

  Cam did as he was told, smoothing it as he went. He didn’t ask what it meant. He knew better. Ari disclosed information when he was good and ready, never before.

  “Great,” Ari said. “Let’s do the other side.”

  “That’s my name out there,” Calliope said when they returned.

  “Sort of,” Zara pointed out.

  “Look,” Ari said, “I honestly don’t know any more than you do at this point. Pilot just called and told me to turn the decals over.”

  “No other instructions yet?” Donnie asked, suspicious.

  “He did say to enjoy ourselves.”

  “I’m not a big soccer fan,” Donnie grumbled. “But maybe they sell sausages at the game.”

  They were an hour early when Ari pulled into the section of the lot reserved for large vehicles. A dark, well-dressed Brazilian woman met the bus and waited politely for someone to step outside. Ari shrugged and exited to chat with her. Moments later, he climbed back into the bus and asked for everyone’s attention.

  “What’s going on?” Donnie demanded.

  “Apparently, we’re special guests.”

  CAM’S PLAYLIST

  21. PERFORMANCE ANXIETY

  by Crush

  22. HAMSTER WHEEL

  by The Fluffy Bunnies

  23. REVELATION

  by Breathe

  “Give me a moment!”

  The seats were good, down low in Zeraõ Stadium’s bleachers. When the game started Cam felt like he was practically on the field with the teams. He couldn’t help feeling spirited. He’d root for the local team, he decided—the black-and-white-striped Amapá Clube. The raven-haired woman who’d escorted them in had led them past the food vendors, souvenir booths, and a more modern Internet kiosk to their section. She spoke English and explained that the midfield line was exactly on the equator so that each team defended one hemisphere. The stands were full, and the crowd behind Cam was raucous—an important match, it seemed, or at least a hated rival. Cam wondered if the organization had planned the outing especially for him. He was the soccer player of the group. Mere weeks earlier he wouldn’t have imagined himself at a Brazilian regional match on the Amazon River. He laughed privately—he might not have gotten his fast car, but this was certainly an adequate substitute. He wondered if they sold zebra-striped replica jerseys.

  Jules sat next to him, clapping along with the crowd at times, though Cam didn’t think she knew much about soccer. She spent the other half of her time wandering around seeing the sights or visiting the restroom. Donnie sat one row back, polishing off his second sausage and tipping back a beer. They didn’t sell sausages at the stadium, but the woman made a call, and a nearby street vendor hurried over with nine of them, which they paid for with money Pilot had given each of them. Calliope had passed, willing hers to Donnie before she disappeared with the woman, taking Ari with her to translate.

  The first goal came in the twenty-third minute on a corner kick to the head of an Amapá midfielder, who drove it into the back of the net, and the crowd went crazy. Cam was pleased to see the others enjoy the moment too. Even Donnie cheered. Zara rocked back and forth to a song the crowd had taken up. And Wally was folding paper flyers into airplanes and trying to drift them out onto the field of play. Fortunately, they banked left or right and flew in slow circles instead until their short flights ended and they were trampled underfoot.

  Then it was halftime.

  The teams retired to the sidelines for the break, and several stadium employees hauled a platform onto the field. Next came sound equipment, quickly hooked up by scrambling young men in collared shirts with a logo on the breast. Finally, three big men wheeled a piano out onto the platform.

  Donnie rose. “I’m going to go find the bathroom.”

  “I gotta go too,” Owen said.

  “Wait.” It was Zara. “I think you might find the halftime entertainment interesting.” She pointed down to the platform, where a woman in a long red dress was approaching the piano. She strode to the bench and slid her hips onto it in a practiced manner Cam recognized immediately.

  Jules jumped out of her seat. “It’s Calliope!”

  Two young girls unfurled a CALLI banner, and then Calliope began to play. It was not the song she’d performed for Cam. Not so dark. A catchier rhythm. More accessible. Still, it was unmistakably a piece she’d written. After the upbeat piano intro, she slowed it down and began to sing. Quiet at first. The audience strained to hear, affording her the courtesy of a minute’s chance to win them over and intrigued by what they couldn’t quite make out yet. She pulled them in, and then, just when a murmur might have begun or the restless might have started shifting in their seats, she blasted them. Her voice rang clear—a scream drowning any conversations about finding the bathroom or stepping out for sausage. They were stunned.

  After the initial shock, her voice fell back in with the steady beat of the song, and the crowd embraced the reprieve with eager relief. She gave them a clear refrain and then began another build, an implicit threat to scream again. But when she reached the song’s moment of greatest tension, she didn’t. She spared them, and for that they were grateful. They clapped along as she led them through a verse and back toward the refrain, and then delighted them by signing it in Portuguese. She had to have practiced this, Cam realized.

  The song rose and fell, and rose again higher, and when she had built it to its limit and it strained for release, she pointed out at the waiting fans, and they screamed for her. She played three final, emphatic notes, and then she was done. There was a moment of silence as they made sure that she was finished, or perhaps they were simply marveling over what they’d just heard, and then the stands erupted. They didn’t stop cheering until Calliope had waved two good-byes and disappeared beneath the stands. Cam looked around. The crowd nodded and smiled, still clapping. The entire Deathwing team stood, stunned.

  Their phones all rang at once.

  Cam hurried his headset to his ear while the others did the same. It was Pilot. He spoke to them all via conference call.

  “Time to go to work,” he said. “And you need to move fast. Take the stairs to the VIP area. There is a dressing room. Calliope will be receiving a man there. He has guards with him. They are to be incapacitated when Calliope calls for you. We prefer they are not killed.”

  “Prefer”? Cam thought.

  “Who is he?” Jules asked.

  “There’s little time. Are you moving?”

  “Yes,” Donnie reported, pushing the others toward the stairs.

  “Good. He is an owner of bauxite mines. An aspiring politician. Very powerful in his own country, but vulnerable here. He has a weakness for soccer and female singers. Good luck.”

  Pilot hung up as they descended to the lower level. A long hallway was lined with doors. Their well-dressed hostess stood at the first door. She smiled as they passed, and she pointed halfway down the hall to where Ari was waiting. A large man stood beyond him at the far end.

  “One way in, one way out,” Zara observed. “Not great.”

  Ari met them midway between the woman and the man, out of earshot of both. “Four more bodygu
ards inside the lounge,” he said quietly. “No guns—they don’t carry them in this country.”

  “What are we doing?” Cam asked.

  “Getting ready. Our little performer will call when she needs us. In the meantime, just look like Calli’s roadies, because that seems to be what we are. She’s the lead on this one, my friends.”

  “She didn’t say a word about any of this,” Jules complained.

  Cam nodded, understanding what Jules did not. “She’s a vault,” he said.

  Jules’s phone rang. She tapped it. “Yes?”

  Cam watched her shake her head, and then her eyes filled with tears.

  “I know,” Jules said. “We love you.” She turned. “Cam, she wants to talk to you.”

  Cam took the headset. “What’s happening in there?” he asked suddenly and loudly. Ari had to shush him.

  Her voice was strangely calm. “Relax, Cam. I want to thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For being a nice guy. For making me feel special.” She paused. “And I’m sorry I didn’t leave you that note. Whoever did is making a wise choice.”

  “Thanks, but this is an odd time. Everyone is standing here listening to me.”

  “I don’t care. I have to go. And you have to come. Now. Good-bye, Cam.”

  “Calliope…?” He didn’t understand. He wanted to talk some more. There had been a connection. He hadn’t imagined it. Cam looked up to find the team staring at him and realized that he had no idea how long he’d been standing there holding the dead phone.

  “Well, what did she say?” Donnie demanded.

  “She said come now.”

  They started for the door. In the other direction their hostess’s phone rang. She answered, and her face paled. She rushed from the hallway, tapping the screen on her phone furiously.

  “Go time!” Donnie said, and he strode toward the man at the end of the hall, fists balled in anticipation.

  The team followed. The man watched Calli’s friends come, unconcerned.

  “Calli called us,” Ari announced as they approached.

  The man admitted them to the waiting room just as a feminine cry of alarm rose from behind the dressing room door on the far side of the room.

  “Something’s wrong!” Ari shouted, and he started toward the door.

  The four guards were lounging on couches. They leaped to their feet, one going to the door, another moving to stop Ari. But Donnie and Tegan were already among them like wolves, moving even faster than Cam remembered from training. Donnie wrapped himself around a guard’s arm and yanked upward with a popping sound. The man went down immediately, his elbow bent backward, forearm flopping loose. Tegan grappled another and flipped him over a couch. They moved so fast that they disposed of their initial opponents before the others had time to turn on them.

  The man from the hall stepped into the room to enter the fray, but Zara whirled and planted her heel square in his jaw with a sickening crunch. His head snapped back and rebounded from the doorframe. Cam winced. He’d felt the impact of her foot himself—it had practically caved in his chest, and she hadn’t been trying to injure him.

  All of it happened before Cam had a chance to move. Two men remained. One faced Donnie, who still had his foot on the guard with the broken arm. Cam shoved the man from behind. He went down, but came right back up, flicking out a telescoping rod. He swung it at Cam’s head.

  “Club!” Wally shouted. He grabbed a pillow to catch the blow. The silver rod flashed like a darting fish, striking foam as Cam fell backward on the couch. The pillow saved Cam, but the cudgel was deflected into Wally’s own face. It smacked flesh and bone. Wally howled, but fought through the blow to grab the man’s hand. He pulled it down and smashed it against the coffee table once, then again, and again. Bone splintered against wood, the rod long gone. The man lay writhing on the ground as Wally straddled his arm and began to hammer his unrecognizable hand into the table like a small red sledge, until Jules and Owen pulled him off.

  The violence ended suddenly. The guards were all incapacitated. None were dead. Wally bled profusely from his nose, which sat askew on his face, obviously broken. Ari hurried to stanch the bleeding with the pillow, while Jules calmed him down. He’d taken a glancing blow that might have broken Cam’s skull.

  There was another shout of alarm behind the dressing room door, male this time.

  “Calliope!” Cam gasped, and he leaped to the far door.

  It was locked, but cheap and flimsy. Tegan’s size-thirteen shoe made short work of it. It burst open, and Cam shoved his way inside.

  The man kneeling on the floor had to be the bauxite politician. He was at least fifty and wore a suit. He yelled for his guards, but Cam shook his head, making it clear they wouldn’t be coming.

  Calliope was sprawled on the floor before him like a sacrificial offering. Cam’s heart sank. The woman who’d given such life to a crowd of thousands lay still now, her eyes open but empty, the knife that ended her song nearby on the floor. Her crimson dress was puddled in the corner, and a pool of equally red blood widened slowly on the floor beneath her nude body, so pale by contrast that she might have been carved from a single piece of alabaster.

  “You killed her!” Donnie barked.

  The man was panicked. “No!” he said. “She asked to see my knife. She stabbed herself!”

  Donnie and Cam started for the man at the same time. But there was a commotion in the hall behind them. Their hostess had returned with stadium security.

  Ari grabbed them both by the shoulder. “No! It’s over,” he said, casting a sorrowful glance at the unreal scene. “Pilot says to go.”

  “What’s happening?” Jules wailed in the doorway.

  “Time to go!” Ari insisted.

  And then they were pushing past stadium security hurrying in the opposite direction.

  “In there!” Ari shouted to the bewildered officers on his way out. “He stabbed her!”

  Jules was sobbing. Zara kept looking back over her shoulder, as though she burned to go back and wipe the floor with the bauxite man. But it was too late. They’d been too slow.

  And it’s my fault, Cam thought. Calliope had said “now,” and he’d hesitated. He had stood debating her affection like a needy pubescent boy instead of saving her life like a man. Not focused. Not strong enough. Not fast enough. A failed knight cringing behind a foam shield wielded by a lunatic who was a more worthy male protector than he.

  CAM’S PLAYLIST

  22. HAMSTER WHEEL

  by The Fluffy Bunnies

  23. REVELATION

  by Breathe

  24. GROWTH SPURT

  by The Lucky Ones

  “I try to reach the top, but it just won’t stop.”

  They were in the parking lot, the commotion of the match and the sinister events beneath the stadium behind them. The team was focusing on the task at hand—exiting, escaping. Purpose kept the insanity at bay. Ari trotted to a stop at the large empty parking stall.

  “What the hell?” he barked.

  The bus was gone.

  Their phones rang. Pilot spoke. “Vehicle change. Three cars. Keys under the visors. Directions on the GPS. Get out of there. The police are coming.”

  They found the cars quickly, two BMW sedans and a black Dodge Charger. But Pilot was wrong. The police weren’t coming—they were already there. Two patrol cars burst into the parking lot, sirens blaring. One proceeded to the stadium. The other slowed and turned their way.

  Ari ducked. “Shit! Don’t show them which cars you’re taking. I’ll draw them off.” With that, he threw himself in the driver’s seat of the Charger. Jules followed, and though he waved her off, she got in anyway. The rest of them waited to climb into the BMWs as Ari tore out of the lot past the oncoming patrol car.

  The police car accelerated after him. Moments later, Cam was in a BMW with Wally and Zara. Wally climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “You’re not driving,” Cam said, horrified
at the prospect of riding in a car with Wally at the wheel. When Wally started to protest, Cam pointed at his ruined nose. “You’re injured.”

  Zara pushed Wally aside and secured the keys. “I got this,” she said.

  “The GPS should take us on the same route as Ari,” Cam pointed out. “No need to catch up. Just keep it calm, inconspicuous.”

  He didn’t feel calm or inconspicuous, but it seemed like the right thing to say. They drove through town unnoticed, following the speed limit and the GPS on the dashboard. Zara drove efficiently and with razor-sharp reflexes, snapping in and out of her lane to avoid the less-than-careful local drivers.

  At the edge of town they went north, followed the highway for a time, and then turned onto a secondary road. It was only a mile before they came upon the police car. It was parked on the side of the road just beyond two horrendous potholes, its lights still flashing. The other BMW was tucked in behind it. Owen waved them down, and they pulled over and hopped out. The officer sat in the back of his own car behind the safety cage with a deep frown. Owen quickly explained that Tegan had stuffed him inside after they’d confronted and overpowered him.

  “Where’s Ari?”

  Owen took a deep breath. He pointed off the road at a reddish dirt field. “Over there.”

  Cam gasped and started into the field.

  “Wait!” Owen called after him. But Cam saw the problem, and he didn’t wait.

  The Charger lay on its side. It looked unremarkable, entirely unlike car wrecks from the movies. No smoke. No ominously spinning tire. It was as though a giant child had simply left his toy car on its side when he’d been called to dinner. Donnie and Tegan stood atop the Charger, wrenching on the bent passenger door. Metal squealed, and then gave, and the door came loose. The two of them hauled it open. They leaned in and dragged Jules out. She was in hysterics, babbling about Ari.