The Flicker Men

by Ted Kosmatka

  “So that’s where he gets them.”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “If those who can’t collapse the wave are called the fated, then who are we? What name do you give us?”

  “We are the lost,” she said. “As we are in all the old stories. Awaiting our redemption or our judgment. It’s not just space that dilates between worlds, but time as well. As one world lives inside another, a single moment can live inside a thousand years.”

  “And these flicker men, I still don’t see where they fit. Who are they in all this?”

  Here she paused. She looked toward the pendulum, watching it swing. “They come from higher in the cascade. Not of this world, nor the next, but higher.”

  I stared at her. “And why did they come?”

  “Something happened far upstream from us. Something terrible. The bright ones came long ago. And others who fought the bright ones.”

  “Others,” I said.

  “What one side sought to build, the other side sought to destroy. We were their battleground.”

  “What happened?”

  “They killed each other. The builders lost, their battles recorded in hieroglyphics. The Indus River valley. Teotihuacán. Peru. Other places, too. The boldest of them died first—then the rest, one after another. Their struggles reflected in the rise and fall of civilizations. The two sides annihilated each other until only a few of the old ones remained. The most careful. The most cunning. The ones who could most easily hide.”

  “Ones like Brighton, you mean.”

  She nodded. “One of the last.”

  “And what of the others?”

  “Gone. Dead.”

  “Do you understand how impossible this sounds?”

  “What is impossible on the time scale of a universe? Or a thousand thousand universes?”

  “So if all that is true, and you learned this working for Brighton, then why help me? Why step in front of that?”

  “Philosophers may think that evil exists so good may reveal itself, but I think sometimes evil can sneak up on you, too, so that you don’t even realize that you are a part of it. And then when you do realize, it’s too late, and so you continue on, doing evil because you are scared or because you must, and in this way it is possible to betray your whole life, your whole existence, one decision at a time. I’ve been a Judas. Scientists have died because of me. The best and the brightest. I decided not one more. I tried to save Satvik, and I failed. Maybe you have a chance.”

  She stopped and looked up at the pendulum, and the gray mass of iron swung past in a whoosh of air.

  “A little more than a year ago, this pendulum shifted,” she said. “The pins are supposed to drop on a regular schedule. Steady as any clock. But last year, the pendulum left a pin standing. A small detail. Hardly noticeable unless somebody was watching.” She lowered into a crouch near the ring of pins. “The balance has shifted. Something has changed.”

  “What does that mean?”

  The pendulum swung past Vickers again, going in the other direction. It disappeared into the shadows.

  She turned to look at me. “It means time is against us now.”

  38

  Vickers led me back to the encampment. It was early afternoon and the camp was a bustle of activity. The fire was nearly out. Sleeping bags packed away. I had the sense that there was a procedure being followed—like practiced soldiers breaking down their bivouac. Mercy paused when she saw me, relief washing across her face. I realized that she hadn’t been sure I was coming back. I wondered if that happened much. Did people often go for walks with Vickers and not return?

  Vickers spoke to Hennig in hushed tones near the trailer. A few minutes later, they climbed in the panel van and left.

  Mercy and I fed the fire. The flames crackled. “So it looks like you’re staying,” she said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You’re still alive.”

  Mercy tossed the last of our wood on the pile, and over the next minutes the fire grew. I watched her face, but she never looked at me. Eyes on the flickering heat.

  When the others still hadn’t returned an hour later, I spoke. “Where did they go?”

  “They’ll be back,” she said. Which wasn’t really an answer.

  While I watched the burning embers, I considered what Vickers had said, trying to wrap my head around it. Nested universes. Infinite surface area. The flicker men from somewhere higher. Their souls burning their way down through layers of reality like hot stones through ice.

  Outside the wind blew, and I heard branches scratching on the sides of the corrugated building. It was full dark when the fire started dying again, so I followed Mercy out for more wood. We were only gone twenty minutes, but when we returned, the panel van was back, parked near the wall. Its engine ticking like it had been driven hard. Hennig and Vickers were nowhere to be seen. Off somewhere deeper in the ruins.

  Mercy and I nursed the fire back to life. Half an hour later, there was a scream of pain in the distance. A man’s voice crying out. It seemed to hang on the night air, fading slowly.

  Mercy didn’t react. Didn’t even look up from the fire. Like she’d known it was coming.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “You’ll see soon enough,” she said.

  * * *

  Another hour passed before the others returned. They entered the encampment without a word, Hennig’s shirt bearing new spatters of red. I didn’t ask where they’d been. We ate our dinners from cans, the clink of forks on tin. No one spoke. Just the mesmerizing flicker of the fire, until sometime later even that seemed to fade as the flames sank to a dull glow in the shadow.

  I slept by the warm coals, and this time my arms were blessedly free of tape. They trusted me not to bash their heads in while they slept.

  In the morning a boot woke me, a firm shove against my shoulder. My eyes unpeeled to Hennig looking down. “Get up,” he said.

  Mercy and Vickers were nowhere to be seen. I was apparently last to wake.

  “This way,” he said.

  He led me back through the hole in the wall through which they had come the previous night. A sharp right turn, and I followed him through a doorway and down a short flight of stairs into a kind of cellar.

  Here Mercy and Vickers stood, waiting—Vickers, in her business casual suit, seeming out of place.

  I stepped closer to Mercy, her back to me. “What is this?” I whispered.

  Mercy gave no answer, but Vickers had overheard me. “A quiet room,” she said. “Come.”

  I followed them farther in. The basement was dank but well lit; a lantern hung from exposed conduits. In the center of the room was a man tied to a chair. Blood crusted the floor around him in a dry smear. Not quiet enough, I thought, remembering the scream I’d heard the night before.

  The man was dead. His face battered.

  I had a sudden flash of myself in a chair much like this one—Hennig’s fist smashing into my head. A bad way to die.

  Vickers looked at me as if expecting a reaction.

  “Who is it?” I said.

  “You don’t recognize him?”

  I tilted my head, looking closer. My blood ran cold. “I’ve seen him,” I said. One of the men from Brighton’s penthouse.

  “A member of their security team,” Vickers said. “Well, ex-member now.”

  It was the guard who had stayed behind. The guard from the kitchen. His sport jacket now caked with dried blood. I took a step backward, and my feet stuck to the floor. The tacky pool was six feet wide.

  Vickers walked around the body. “He had a few internal injuries when we picked him up. Then a few external ones. Before he died, he gave us information.”

  I looked at the body and wondered what methods of persuasion had been used. No obvious signs of torture beyond the battered face. No lumpy kneecaps. Just a face turned to hamburger.

  “What information?” I felt sick. I thought of Satvik, wrapped in the tarp. I thou
ght of him in the elevator—his last few moments of life, when he thought he was going to see his family again. I looked at the body in front of me now, and I couldn’t feel pity. I couldn’t feel anything.

  “About the eberaxi,” Vickers said. “Brighton’s done an admirable job of keeping the information hidden, but there’s always a weakness. A security detail hears things, sees things. It’s hard to keep secrets from those whose job it is to protect you.”

  “Did you learn that while working there?”

  “Among other things,” she said.

  “What is this eberaxi?”

  “We don’t know for sure,” Vickers said. “A weapon perhaps.”

  “Like a bomb?”

  “Perhaps. Or something more subtle. The aberrant axis. A thing mentioned in their oldest archives. A thing they’ve been watching for. Waiting for. The change in the pendulum was supposed to be a sign. All we know is that it is important to them.”

  “What does it look like?”

  She was silent, looking at me.

  “You don’t know that either,” I said. “It sounds like you didn’t learn much.”

  She gestured to the dead man. “We learned that you’re a part of it.”

  “I’m not part of anything.”

  “It would seem Brighton disagrees. Which is why he was so angry that you’d gotten away.”

  Heavy boots clomped their way from the shadows, and Hennig stepped near Vickers. He seemed to take up all the empty space.

  Vickers turned toward me. “And we have you to thank for this information.” She turned to look at me. “Without you, we never would have been able to catch this one. He was out looking for you. We caught him near your motel.”

  39

  Mercy came to me later that evening, bearing two cups of coffee. One for her, one for me.

  The sound of Vickers and Hennig drifted in from around the corner. Their voices rose and then grew quiet. A low murmur.

  The darkness of the camp was beaten back by the dying fire. I sat wrapped in a blanket, leaning against the wall of the trailer.

  Mercy crossed through a slant of dim starlight that angled through a hole in the roof.

  Other than her name, I still didn’t know anything about her.

  Hennig, too, was a mystery. Perhaps he was a pirate, truly, with long experience in kidnap and robbery. Mayhem off the Madagascar coast. Perhaps he had sent a dozen yachts to the bottom of the sea.

  And Mercy. A name that was more than a name.

  Mercy held the mug out to me. “Careful, it’s hot. Fresh brewed over the fire.”

  “I didn’t know you could brew coffee over a flame.” I reached out to take the offered cup.

  “The word brew is perhaps a bit generous,” she said. “Now my grandmother was dangerous with her coffee. I’m not saying her hands shook, but she never had more than half a cup by the time she crossed the kitchen. I learned not to walk beneath her. I hope you like creamer and sugar.”

  “I do. Where are the others?”

  She shrugged. “Walking the grounds. Making plans.”

  She stood next to me.

  I thought of asking her what plans, but before I could, she said, “I don’t think any of it will matter.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the plans will fail,” she said. “Now drink.” She watched me sip. “How is your coffee?”

  I pulled the warm cup away from my lips. “It’s good.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I am.”

  “It’s the cheap shit—boiling water, crushed grounds. It’s only technically coffee. Vickers always brings fresh supplies from town, so we’ll have good creamer for a day or two before it goes bad. The creamer is what makes it drinkable. Good Karma, hazelnut. That’s the name. A ridiculous indulgence I picked up from a boyfriend in college. His name I can barely remember, but this damn coffee? Etched in my heart. Now, wherever I go, I have to seek it out. It would make tar taste good, I think. Usually I don’t drink it this late, though, since the caffeine keeps me up.”

  “Well, don’t risk insomnia for my sake.” I tried to picture her in a normal life, going to college, dumping boyfriends. The image wouldn’t come. Her pink, shattered hand clutched at her ceramic cup.

  “No, it’s fine. Tonight I’m in no hurry to sleep. Puts off the bad dreams.”

  I looked at her fingers wrapped around the mug. Raw, pink flesh. Six months healed, maybe longer. I wondered how it had happened. Nothing about the injury looked clean. No straight edges. Just missing bits of flesh, as if a firecracker had gone off in her hand.

  “So you think their plans will fail?”

  “I think we’re going to die. Every single one of us.” She sat down next to me, legs stretched out in front of her, pointing at the fire. “Like this world is gonna die. Like all worlds die. Over a long enough timetable, nothing escapes entropy.”

  “But that’s the key, isn’t it? The timetable.”

  She didn’t respond. Instead we sat silently for a while, and I waited for her to say more. She didn’t. She sipped the coffee and watched the fire.

  “How did you get pulled into this? What happened?”

  “They happened.” She stood and walked a few steps into the darkness. She bent and pulled something large from the shadows, and when she returned to the glow of the dying fire, I saw it was a tattered cardboard box. A scrap hoarded from the yard.

  “The flicker men.” I said.

  She nodded and tossed the cardboard box on the fire. At first, all light died from the world—snuffed out, the blackness complete. Then a yellow flare bloomed at the cardboard’s lower bottom corner as the fire caught, growing larger by the second until the whole box was aflame. She warmed her hands. Now the fire lit up the room, and I could see rust peeling off the rafters overhead and the dark rectangles on the walls where windows had once been, and I could see her face. Pale and angular.

  “The first time I saw them … later, I couldn’t even remember how it all happened. Still can’t. There are gaps.”

  “Gaps?”

  “Things I can’t remember.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She didn’t even tell you, did she?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “What they’re really like. The reason we call them the flicker men.” She tossed a twig into the fire. “I don’t think your mind can even process it, what happens when things go bad. You fill it in later yourself. For a long time, I thought I was going crazy, but if you’re crazy long enough, it just begins to feel normal. Maybe you know a little about that.”

  “Maybe a little.” I wondered then how much she knew about me. Or maybe she just saw it in my eyes.

  “I mean, what kind of thing does that to you?” she asked. “What is so awful that you can’t even see it, and you have to fill it in?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can sometimes choose not to see them at all if you work at it. And I think that’s how most people see them. Or don’t see them. Most people just see them in the way that they can handle. In the way that they want to see them.”

  “What about you?”

  “It’s not always a choice.”

  I thought of my mother. Belief like a superpower.

  “Their pets are even worse.”

  “Pets?”

  “Hunters,” she said. “You don’t ever want to see those. Some things are more than they seem.”

  “What about me?”

  “Don’t feel special. Some people, it’s like they get pulled into this just so they can die. I’ve seen it before.” She was quiet for a moment, but then added, “Though you do seem to have the knack.”

  “What knack?”

  “For surviving.”

  I took another sip of my coffee. “Vickers said that she used to work for them. Did you work for them, too?”

  She shook her head. “No. Some of us … it draws us in. Pulls us like we were a part of it somehow, even if none of it seem
s connected. For me, I thought I was just at the right place at the wrong time. But it was more than that.”

  “More?”

  “Maybe I’ve got a knack as well.”

  There was a sound behind me. I turned my head, and Hennig stood at the doorway, watching us. I wondered how long he had been there. Maybe he’d been there all along. He had a rifle barrel clasped loosely in his right hand, wooden stock resting on the floor. His face looked wooden in the warm glow of the embers. He lifted the rifle and faded back toward the darkness

  When he was gone, Mercy whispered, “Be careful of that one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She waited a moment to answer. “He used to be one of their guards.”

  “One of Brighton’s guards?” The news shocked me.

  Mercy nodded. “They were done with him. Thought they’d killed him, but Vickers brought him back from the edge, stashed him away, sewed him up. Now he’s her bulldog.”

  I stared into the darkness.

  “He’s loyal to her,” she said. “Other people, though, he bites sometimes.”

  My hand trailed absently across the cement in front of me. I picked up a flat, thin piece of steel from off the floor. Just a piece of scrap. I checked its flex. I folded it in half, corner to corner. I folded it again. Bringing it to a fine point.

  40

  I woke at dawn.

  It was a sound that woke me, a low reverberation at the edge of perception. The sickness already rising in my stomach. Sleep was a fragile thing, easily broken. That’s why I heard it first.

  I opened my eyes. Mercy was a few yards away, face turned to the shadows. I rolled onto my stomach and slid toward her across the filthy floor. I felt the shiv of folded steel in my pocket.

  “Hey.” I shook her arm. “Where’s Vickers?”

  Her eyes fluttered open, confusion showing. “What?” She sat up, rubbing her eyes.

  “Where is Vickers?” I repeated.

  Across the burned-out ashes of the fire, Hennig pulled himself upright. He’d heard it, too.

  The engine sounds grew louder, closer. “Cars,” Hennig said. “More than one.”