Firewalkers

by Chris Roberson

  But when Daphne pulled over to the curb on Hauser Avenue in front of Izzie’s hotel, that weight came crushing back down. It was one thing to spend idle time with frivolous distraction, and quite another to waste valuable time that could be better spent pursuing their agenda.

  “I just need to run up to my room and grab some things,” Izzie said as she opened the passenger side door, “and then I’m heading over to the RA.” She pointed with her chin across the street at the building that housed the offices of the FBI’s Recondito Resident Agency.

  “I’m going to swing by my place, and then I’ll meet you back here.” Daphne leaned to one side to look out the window at Izzie as she closed the passenger-side door. “You need me to bring you anything? Clothes, maybe? I know you didn’t bring much with you in your go-bag, and I think my stuff would fit you.”

  Izzie put a hand on her hip and cocked her head to one side. “I’m not sure we’re at the ‘borrowing each other’s clothes’ stage of things just yet, Agent Richardson. I can make do with what I’ve got.”

  Daphne stuck out her tongue. “Okay, meet you at the offices in a bit.”

  As the compact hybrid pulled away from the curb and merged back into traffic, Izzie hurried into the hotel. She didn’t want to waste any time.

  Fifteen minutes later, she was back downstairs with her go-bag slung over her shoulder. She’d packed up just about everything she had brought with her from home, including toothbrush and clothes, and had supplemented it with the complimentary toiletries that the hotel cleaning staff had left in the room. She wasn’t sure when she would be coming back, but if she ended up showering at Patrick’s place again, she didn’t want to have to rely again on that sad sliver of soap that she’d been forced to use in his upstairs bathroom that morning.

  As Izzie walked over to the crosswalk to get to the east side of Hauser, a car parked further up the street caught her eye. It was idling, the parking lights on, and her first thought was that it was an Uber or Lyft driver waiting to pick up a passenger. But she didn’t see any of the usual stickers or markings in the windows, and no one on the sidewalk was making a move toward it. Someone was sitting in the driver’s seat behind the wheel, but their face was almost completely obscured by wraparound sunglasses and a hoodie.

  Keeping the car in the corner of her vision without making it obvious she was looking, Izzie stood at the curb by the crosswalk and waited for the light to change. She felt as though the driver in the parked car might be watching her, but she couldn’t be sure.

  When the light changed, Izzie felt a momentary chill of fear. Stepping out into the road to cross to the other side would put her directly in the path of the parked car, if the driver were to suddenly put it into gear and gun the accelerator. Was she putting herself at risk? What if this were how Zotovic or his subordinates planned to eliminate any threat she posed to their operation, while making it appear to be an everyday traffic accident?

  The numbers on the crosswalk light started counting down from ten. If Izzie wanted to get across, she needed to go now.

  Hiking the strap of her go-bag higher on her shoulder, Izzie steeled her nerves and stepped off the curb onto the tarmac.

  From the corner of her eye she could see the parked car, but from this angle she couldn’t get a clear look at the driver without turning her head, so she kept her eyes straight ahead and continued walking.

  The numbers had counted down to six by the time she reached the middle of the street. If the driver intended to hit her, he’d now have to drive into oncoming traffic to do so. Which didn’t make Izzie all that much safer, but would make any accident she suffered look less like an accident and more like the driver was going out of his way to hit her intentionally.

  A few seconds remained on the count as Izzie approached the eastern side of Hauser, and so intent was she on paying attention to the car down the street behind her that she almost didn’t notice the truck barreling down the street from north to south, heading directly for her.

  She heard the growl of the diesel engine just in time, and dove for the curb just as the truck roared right through the crosswalk.

  If she hadn’t jumped over those last few feet, the truck would have run right into her. And at the speed it was surging down the street there wouldn’t have been much left of her but a bloody streak down the tarmac.

  Still clutching the strap of her go-bag, teetering on the edge of the curb, Izzie wheeled around and looked in the direction of the parked car. The driver in the sunglasses and hoodie was looking directly at her, there was no question of that. Then he put the car in drive and sped off down Hauser to the north.

  There hadn’t been time to get the tags on the truck, which she’d noticed didn’t have any logo or markings on its plain white exterior, but she got her phone out just in time to snap a photo of the license plate of the car as it sped away from her. Maybe it was just a coincidence that it had driven off just as she had narrowly avoided being run over by a truck? After all, the light had just changed. Or maybe the parked car was acting as a spotter, letting the driver of another vehicle, one more capable of inflicting serious injury, know when it was time to strike?

  It seemed more plausible to think it was just a coincidence, Izzie knew. But given how many unlikely connections they’d uncovered in their investigations this past week, she wasn’t willing to rule out anything at this point.

  The offices of the Resident Agency were closed, so after Izzie signed in with the security guard at the front entrance of the building, she used the keypad beside the office door to enter the access code she’d been assigned, and the door buzzed open.

  “Jiggity jig,” she muttered to herself as she made her way into the silent offices. This was familiar territory. When she had been in Recondito five years before working on the Reaper task-force, there had been many late nights and weekends when she had found herself working alone in the RA offices, whether doing research or combing through forensic evidence or simply catching up on the mountains of paperwork that such an intensive investigation required. Spending so much time during the daylight hours canvassing for witnesses or searching for material evidence, the off hours were often the only opportunity she had to catch up.

  She was overdue in filing a report on her current investigations, of course. But that was less a question of a lack of opportunity, and more a desire not to have her security clearance revoked and her sanity questioned. Daphne had offered to provide what assistance she could in her own reporting, helping to provide justification for Izzie’s continued presence in the city, and the need to continue liaising with the Recondito Police Department. But Izzie would have to give something to her superiors in Quantico to account for her time here.

  The laptop that she had borrowed from the office’s equipment supplies was still on the desk that Izzie had been assigned, and after turning on the lights and dropping her go-bag on an empty chair, she sat down and turned it on.

  After logging into her work email account, she quickly scanned through a few threads from her colleagues at the Behavioral Analysis Unit about other ongoing investigations, replied to a couple of requests for clarification on a few reports she had filed before leaving for Recondito, and then began to compose a brief summary of the last forty-eight hours for her supervisor. When she’d last checked in on Thursday morning, she had covered the highlights without going into great detail, explaining how she and Lieutenant Tevake had met with the chief medical examiner, interviewed a professor at Ross University named Hayao Kono who provided some background on Nicholas Fuller’s scientific research, and then had observed a tactical unit of the RPD carry out a drug raid.

  As she prepared her summary of the events since that update, she was conscious of the fact that in the broad strokes the new update followed much the same lines. She and Patrick had met with Joyce Nguyen to get the results of an autopsy of a suspected drug dealer, then returned to Ross University to meet with another professor who had some background on Fuller, and finally she
and Agent Richardson had accompanied officers of the RPD on a raid. The differences, though, were that the autopsy results indicated that the drug dealer Malcolm Price had already been dead before he got back to his feet and tried to attack Izzie, the background the university professor had provided had largely been concerned with a secret society of Mayan warrior priests, and the raid had ended not with any arrests but with an attack by dozens of the shambling undead and the murder of a police officer. Izzie felt that it was prudent to be as vague about those differences as possible, at least for the time being.

  She still told herself that she fully intended to reveal the entire truth of the situation to the Bureau when the time was right. And yet every time she omitted key details from an official account, or failed to notify her superior about a crucial bit of evidence, or was coy when explaining the nature of her current investigation, an internal war was being waged in the back of her head. Part of her still insisted that it was vital to observe regulations and procedures, if perhaps not in an entirely timely manner. But there was another voice in her head, faint at first but growing in volume, that questioned whether it was necessary to report on this at all.

  But she would have to worry about that later. She had much more pressing concerns in the short term. Like staying alive long enough to figure out exactly what they were dealing with, for one thing.

  After emailing the sanitized summary to her supervisor, Izzie pulled up the photo she’d taken of the license plate of the car outside a short while before. She ran the plates, and within moments discovered that a car with that license plate number, of the same make and model, had been reported stolen the month before. And while she seriously doubted that the elderly retired gentleman in San Diego who was listed as the vehicle’s owner had any connection with the hooded person behind the wheel, she made a note of his name and pertinent details, just for the sake of thoroughness.

  Exasperated, Izzie shut the laptop and slid it across the desk. Then she opened the drawers in the desk until she found the one where she had put her things the previous day, and pulled out a stack of hardcover journals, an academic paper, and a legal pad.

  The previous day, Izzie had spent several hours reading through the journals of Roberto Aguilar, using his granddaughter-in-law Samantha Aguilar’s academic paper as a skeleton key to help her decipher what it was the old man had been writing about. Izzie had filled page after page in the legal pad with her notes, before being interrupted by Patrick’s call to come join him in the warehouse near the docks.

  Roberto Aguilar claimed to have been inducted as a young man into the “daykeepers,” a secret order dating back to the ancient Maya who protected humanity from threats from beyond. The daykeepers believed that entities that Aguilar referred to as “daimons” and “shades” invaded our world from another space which he called “the Unreal.” The daykeepers believed that it was possible for daimons to make use of the bodies of the dead and nearly dead as vessels, and called to those controlled by daimons as “Ridden,” just as those possessed by spirits were called in the Haitian Voudou tradition. Aguilar wrote that the daykeepers believed it was necessary to dismember the bodies of the dead, in order to make them unsuitable as vessels for the daimons.

  Five years before, Izzie and the rest of the taskforce had assumed that the “Recondito Reaper” butchered the remains of his victims in order to satisfy some kind of aberrant psychological gratification. And even after they had identified Nicholas Fuller as their primary suspect, and found the mountain of books on mythology and religion in his apartment, among other obscure and arcane topics, it was believed that Fuller had simply cobbled together a delusional rationalization to justify his own actions and drives to himself.

  But the day before, Izzie and Patrick had learned that Fuller had actually been following in the secret traditions that he had been taught by Roberto Aguilar. He had syncretized and synthesized elements from other religions and mythologies along the way, but the core of his personal belief system derived from the Mayan daykeepers.

  Already the little that she had been able to glean about the daykeepers from Aguilar’s journals had proved to be invaluable. Had she not read in the early evening that they believed that the Ridden could not cross running water, it was likely than Izzie and the others would not have survived the rest of the night. She questioned the efficacy of the Ziploc gris-gris bag that she’d cobbled together that morning, but if it worked at all it was because she had read in Aguilar’s journal that crystals and silver were inimical to the Ridden.

  Silver could disrupt the connection between the Ridden and the daimon, she had noted on the legal pad. What she and the others had taken to calling the loa could be forced out of host’s body if silver was present in the system. Which perhaps explained why Fuller executed his victims with a silver-plated blade?

  And then there was the “key.”

  That night five years ago, as Izzie had lain bleeding on the metal floor of the lighthouse lantern room, Fuller had talked about the “old daykeeper” giving him a key that finally allowed him to understand, and that allowed him to walk through the fire and see the shadows for what they were. It wasn’t until she read Aguilar’s journals that Izzie understood that the “key” Fuller had referred to was the substance the Maya had called ilbal. Samantha Aguilar had assumed that it referred to some kind of crystal or mirror, but Izzie was certain that it was much more than that.

  Izzie and Patrick had learned from some of Fuller’s surviving colleagues at Ross University that toward the end of his time there, when his behavior became increasingly erratic, that he had begun to take some sort of psychotropic drug. Among the evidence that the CSI unit had removed from Fuller’s apartment five years before had been a few small glass vials filled with a crystallized powder. The analysis of the contents conducted by the Recondito Police Department’s Office of Forensic Science had been fairly inconclusive, but their findings had suggested that it was likely derived from some unknown plant species, with a chemical structure similar to hallucinogens like DMT.

  Izzie was convinced that the powder in the vials, the drug that Nicholas Fuller had been taking during the last months of his life, was the substance that the elder Aguilar referred to as ilbal. Fuller believed that it was the key that allowed him to perceive directly the presence of invaders from a higher dimensional space.

  Was that simply a delusion brought on by Fuller’s repeated hallucinogenic experiences, colored by the myths and legends that the old daykeeper had taught him? Or was it a verifiable fact?

  Izzie couldn’t help but wonder what she would experience if she took the ilbal herself. What would she see?

  She picked up the journal on the top of the stack, flipped the legal pad to where she’d left off, and started to read.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Patrick felt like he had been working on his after-action report for ages. But when he finally typed the last entry, and clicked the link to file it, he glanced at the corner of the screen and saw that it had only taken a little more than an hour. It was the middle of the afternoon, with a few hours to go until sunset. So perhaps not ages, Patrick thought, but longer than he would have liked.

  As he pushed back from the desk, Patrick felt his stomach grumbling, and realized that he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. He was sure that Izzie would have given him a hard time for thinking about food when there were so many other pressing concerns at hand, but he told himself that he functioned better on a full stomach. He’d be sacrificing productivity and effectiveness if he didn’t take a break to get something to eat.

  He was rationalizing, he knew, but he was going to do it anyway.

  Logging out of his computer, Patrick tucked his phone in his pocket and clipped his holstered pistol on his belt, then shrugged into his quilted jacket and headed for the elevator.

  He didn’t want to waste more time than was necessary, rationalizations aside. So rather than going all the way down to the garage and driving his car to one of his usua
l lunch spots, he pressed the elevator button for the ground floor. There was a decent taco truck that was usually parked a couple of blocks up Albion, and if it wasn’t open, there was a Korean barbeque across the street that would do in a pinch.

  When the elevator doors opened, he was assaulted by a din of shouting voices. From the looks of it, a fight had broken out between a couple of prisoners in the intake area, and a group of uniformed officers were attempting to break things up. But other prisoners were shouting, urging the two brawlers to continue, whether because they had a stake in the argument or just for their own entertainment; it wasn’t clear.

  Patrick walked over to the officer manning the intake desk. “Everything okay down here, Anderson?”

  Sergeant Anderson turned in his direction, an expression of brief annoyance on her face that faded when she saw it was him. “Oh, hey, Tevake.” She turned back to look at the processing area where the commotion was going on. “Yeah, I’m giving them another thirty seconds to knock it off and then the Tasers come out.” She shook her head. “Couple of hopped-up crackheads like them, though, might have to zap them a few times until they take the hint.”

  “Well, good luck with that,” Patrick said, and continued walking toward the door.

  After badging out through the security gate, he pushed open the door and stepped outside, and wondered what effect a Taser would have on one of the Ridden. Or just electricity in general? If the loa or whatever they were calling it was controlling the body through the central nervous system, would an electrical shock interfere with that? If a bullet couldn’t take down one of the Ridden, would electrocution do the job?