by Conell, Zach
After making sure Rose had made it to the station exit without being called back by the CCFF personnel, Cillian looked around the platform to verify that no one was paying attention to him. Having confirmed this, he turned around to face the railing, but instead of finding a way to take off his sweater so that he could wrap their weapons in it, he put both his hands on the railing and inspected the building down below. The rooftop looked solid and smooth, and since it had been thawing since the previous afternoon, there were no traces of snow left on the surface except at the very edges. He concentrated on one point near the side of the roof and made a quick calculation in his head of the distance between that spot and himself. After glancing over his shoulder one last time, he increased his grip on the railing, and then, in one fluent motion, jumped up, firmly landing on the railing with two feet, before instantly setting off and diving fifteen feet down where he landed clean on his target spot, breaking his fall through a forward roll over his shoulder immediately following impact.
Still got it, he thought triumphantly as he got up and dashed to the edge of the roof where he kneeled to put his hands on the ledge, then turned around and lowered himself down along the wall while hanging from the side of the roof by his hands. Finally he let go and dropped down half a dozen feet into the small alley next to the building, which he had spotted from the station platform. He stood up straight and brushed the dust off his coat and pants. There wasn’t a scratch on him. About a minute later, he casually walked up to Rose, who was standing next to the entrance outside 84th station. Having recognized him, her mouth almost fell open in amazement. The incredulous look she shot him almost made him laugh.
“Cillian? How did you… Where are you coming from?” Rose sputtered.
“We need to get out of here, right away,” he whispered determinedly, “in case someone did see me.”
Impulsively he offered her his hand, which she took in an ostensibly instinctive manner, and began leading her away from the station into the South Side. When they had turned a corner about a hundred yards from the station, he finally answered her question.
“I jumped.”
“What?” There was a note of confusion in her voice. “You jumped? How? I mean from where?”
“From the platform onto the roof I showed you,” he calmly explained.
“Are you serious?” she asked in apparent disbelief.
“I am actually, yes.”
“How is that possible?” Rose exclaimed. “That was like twenty feet lower than the platform! How are you walking now? Shouldn’t you have broken both your legs?”
“It was no more than fifteen, which makes a safe landing possible if you know what you are doing,” he stated stoically. “You just need to break your fall by turning your landing into a forward roll in order to transfer the energy from your downward momentum to a forward motion. It’s basic physics really. Not that it’s easy, but I practiced this all the time during my parkour phase. Back then I was able to land jumps from even greater heights.”
“You’re crazy,” she muttered, while a puzzled smile played on her lips. “I’m impressed, but you are positively insane.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said, smiling back. “I’ll put it this way: while you were learning how to hack into computers and phones, I studied how to hack jumping and climbing.”
“Well, you nailed it.”
“As did you. Anyway, what did you tell them at the checkpoint? I saw you were putting on quite an award-worthy performance.”
Rose burst out laughing.
“Thank you. Those CCFF goons initially refused me, but I managed to change their minds by hysterically repeating that I needed to get my ailing grandmother to a specialist in the North Side.”
“Good heavens! Why didn’t you tell me that? Where does she live?” he joked, making her crack up again.
Chapter Seventeen
Over the next two hours, Cillian and Rose navigated through the conspicuously deserted neighborhood and visited the first three people on their list, but to no avail. Instead of finding answers to their questions, they were hesitantly received by Professor Erdmann’s contacts and eventually encountered selective muteness and in one case outright hostility from the moment they first mentioned glacier, the headhunters, or the Stigmata Man. Moreover, they failed to notice any signs of those three phenomena while walking through the empty streets.
In order to avoid more checkpoints, they decided to go by foot to the SNN where the other two people on their list lived, instead of taking the “L” train as they had originally planned. It was a half-hour walk through increasingly rundown streets lined with progressively dilapidated houses. Close to the end of the first neighborhood, they finally spotted the first “glacier” and “headhunter” graffiti tags on the walls of an abandoned warehouse. After they entered the second neighborhood, they noticed similar graffiti on the walls of decrepit apartment buildings, seemingly closed shops, and even the ruins of a half-collapsed building that looked like it had once been a church.
“We must be getting warmer,” Cillian remarked when, while walking in the street where their fourth contact supposedly lived, they passed a wall covered with street art mentioning not only the headhunters and the drug associated with them, but for the first time also the Stigmata Man, to whom one of the artists had devoted a life-size painting of a faceless man with holes in his hands and feet.
“I guess so,” Rose replied, observing the graffiti. “That one of the Stigmata Man is really creepy.”
Cillian nodded in agreement. “I certainly wouldn’t enjoy having it on my bedroom wall.”
Rose chuckled nervously. A few seconds later she suddenly halted in front of an apartment building on their left.
“Number 101 is probably in there,” she whispered, referring to the address of their fourth contact, a woman named Sofia Guerrero.
They shortly found out that Rose was right; the building housed apartments 89 through 107. They rang the bell for No. 101 and two minutes later entered the living room of Mrs. Guerrero. After taking one look at the sturdy woman in her seventies and quickly glancing around her apartment that did not contain a single piece of technology from the twenty-first century, Cillian was certain this could not be where Rose’s father had unknowingly obtained the USB drive, and judging by the disappointed look on Rose’s face, she had come to the same conclusion. Out of politeness, Cillian nevertheless asked Mrs. Guerrero about Professor Erdmann’s visit.
“Oh, he was such a nice man,” she told Rose, taking her by the hand. “How terrible that he has passed away, and at such a young age. I am so sorry for you, sweetheart.”
“Thank you,” Rose replied, sounding touched but also a little uncomfortable, probably because Mrs. Guerrero didn’t appear to have any plans of letting go of her hand anytime soon.
“Yes, and Sofia had such a nice little chat with him. Oh, I feel so awful, darling,” the elderly woman continued addressing Rose.
Upon hearing this, the latter’s facial expression instantly changed from friendly but awkward to surprised curiosity.
“Excuse me, Mrs .Guerrero, but I’m a little confused. I thought your name was Sofia?” Rose asked rather than stated.
“Oh, that is me, but no one calls me that nowadays. I’m just ‘nana’ or ‘grandma’ or ‘Mrs. Guerrero.’ So in practice, the only one listening to the name Sofia in this house is my granddaughter. She was named after me, you see,” the woman answered, slowly but deliberately.
Cillian and Rose exchanged hopeful glances.
“Ah, now I understand. We only knew that my father visited someone named Sofia here, but we were not aware that there are two of you,” Rose replied with a beaming smile. “Is your granddaughter here right now by any chance?”
“Sure, she’s in her room, probably playing one of her computer games with her friends that I never see because they only talk on the computer. I don’t want to sound old, but in my time we still played games outside, you know. Now ch
ildren barely see the sun anymore except on computer screens. But I can’t blame Sofia for staying inside. In fact I actually prefer it with how dangerous this neighborhood has become. But look at me babbling on. I’m sorry, but I don’t get visitors so often these days. Please take a seat, and I’ll go and get Sofia for you.”
Mrs. Guerrero released Rose’s hand and signaled them to take place on the sofa before shuffling out of the room with surprising swiftness. Before long she returned together with a dark-clothed adolescent girl with long black hair that hung partly in front of her face, revealing only her horn-rimmed glasses, pierced nose, and full lips adorned with dark green lipstick.
“Please get acquainted while I make some tea,” Mrs. Guerrero said as she left the room again.
“Who are you and what do you want?” Sofia asked curtly while intently observing them through her hipster glasses.
Her rude tone annoyed Cillian beyond belief, and knowing that he would probably not be able to hide his irritation in his reply, he hoped that Rose would take the initiative to respond. Luckily she did.
“My name is Rose. I’m the daughter of Professor Reinhart Erdmann, and this is my friend Cillian. We’re here because my father visited you last Tuesday to ask you about certain recent developments in this neighborhood and across the South Side generally, after which he called to tell me that he had learned something very interesting from you that he wanted to discuss with me. Unfortunately I was never able to learn what he was so eager to tell me because he died unexpectedly last Thursday.” At this, Rose drew her right index fingers across her eye as if she was wiping away a tear. Cillian was uncomfortably impressed by her acting abilities.
“I’m sorry to barge in on you like this, but I’ve come here hoping that you can tell me what was on my father’s mind before he died,” she went on in an unsteady voice. “It may sound silly, but I just cannot let it go, so Cillian proposed to simply visit you and see if you can help me to get closure.”
Sofia stared blankly at a spot on the couch somewhere in between Cillian and Rose without moving a muscle.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” she finally said in a lukewarm voice betraying that Rose’s plea had not left her completely cold, although she wasn’t fully convinced of their sincerity yet. “We barely talked. He asked me how I liked living here, and I said it wasn’t bad despite the fact that this isn’t the safest neighborhood in town.”
Even though Rose had just told this young woman a pack of lies wrapped in a thin sheet of truth-paper, Cillian could not accept the fact that she did not instantly melt at hearing Rose’s tragic tale and immediately step up to help them out.
The nerve of that teenager, he thought as he reached in his inner coat pocket and took out Erdmann’s USB drive, assuming it to be the same pen drive the professor had found in his pocket.
“Cut the crap, lady, we know you put this in his pocket,” he snapped furiously but without raising his voice, holding out the USB drive for Sofia to see. “And what was on it might be the cause of his death, so I recommend you start talking right now if you don’t want to get yourself into more trouble than you already are.”
He was aware that he had just sounded like an upset parent lacking proper communication skills, but he couldn’t care less because it worked; she flinched, turned red, buried her face in her hands, and finally produced an incoherent confession interrupted by muffled sobs.
“I’m so sorry… I wanted to help him… He seemed so desperate and I didn’t think it would…”
Cillian felt like an exposed bully, but his embarrassment quickly gave way to admiration as he watched Rose calmly walk over to Sofia and affectionately wrap her arms about the distraught teenager. At that moment Mrs. Guerrero stuck her head around the kitchen door.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t ask before, but is herbal tea all right for you?” Then she noticed her granddaughter. “Oh, Sofia dearest, it’s so sad about the professor, isn’t it? I am so sorry, Feefee. I know he was such a nice man.”
After rushing into the room to lovingly embrace her granddaughter, Mrs. Guerrero returned to the kitchen to get the tea, giving Cillian an opportunity to reassure Sofia, which was pretty successful thanks to a little help from Rose. They had tea with Mrs. Guerrero and her granddaughter, after which the latter invited them both to her room, where she told them everything she knew. She gave Cillian permission to record the entire conversation on his phone so he and Rose could add it to their data.
What Sofia mentioned about the sudden appearance of the mysterious headhunters in the neighborhood about nine months ago and the way they had begun selling glacier and subsequently recruiting their clientele as “fighters” in an unknown war, all exactly echoed the professor’s words. But she also showed them a picture of her brother Hernando, who used to live with her and her grandmother, and told them how he had begun using glacier a few months ago and after running out of money had recently been swayed by a local headhunter to join his crew of fighters in exchange for free glacier and food. That was probably how all glacier fighters were recruited, she reckoned.
About two weeks ago, she had followed Hernando to one of his meetings with his shady friends in an abandoned warehouse nearby, where she had been able to film a short part of their training session without being noticed. When Professor Erdmann had visited them, her brother was at home and so she didn’t dare say anything about the headhunters and their glacier fighters, as Hernando had warned her not to discuss these things with anyone. But when Erdmann was drinking tea with her grandmother, she had managed to go to her room, copy her footage onto a USB drive, and slip it in his coat, which was hanging in the hall.
The word on the street was that the headhunters all worked for the Stigmata Man, a deeply religious, mysterious man with scars on his hands resembling stigmata, who had roots in the South Side and was on a mission to liberate the SNNs from oppression by Mayor Gullfay and his “pack of bloodhounds in city hall,” whose power depended solely on their success in demonizing the South Side in the eyes of Chicagoans from other parts of the city and who were on a mission to sabotage the development of the South Side by relying on the brutality of their special police force.
The Stigmata Man had recruited the headhunters to raise him a guerrilla force of loyal South Side soldiers to resist Mayor Gullfay’s zero-tolerance army and fulfill the “divine destiny” of freeing the South Side. Sofia explained that precisely because the Stigmata Man balanced profound political criticism with deranged messianic ramblings, he had gained a large public following in the South Side among disgruntled SNN residents who hoped he would bring change, any kind of change, while many glacier fighters bestowed legendary status on him, and the most fanatic devotees even regarded him as nothing short of a prophet.
Little was known about the identity or appearance of the Stigmata Man, apart from his supposed South Side roots, scarred hands, and large financial resources—obtained in ways nobody knew of—because only a few of the headhunters had ever met him in person and they revealed merely snippets of information that fueled the Stigmata Man’s growing cult of personality.
South Side residents were generally reluctant to discuss any of these developments, especially with “outsiders”—that is, with people who were not from the South Side themselves—as they were petrified to be branded as “snitches” by the headhunter squads.
Last week Hernando had told Sofia that the Stigmata Man would be visiting the South Side over the weekend to meet with the headhunters and inspect his fighters. Her brother had been in a state of childlike excitement all week, but after going out to meet his fellow fighters on Saturday morning, he had not come back home. Sofia had stopped by the warehouse where Hernando had been training, but it was empty now. She had asked her friends and acquaintances in the neighborhood, but it appeared that no one had seen a single headhunter or glacier fighter since Saturday morning. Some people had claimed that the fighters were preparing for a big operation to the north of the South Side, but no one
had been able to tell her any details. Sofia was incredibly worried about her brother and hoped that Rose and Cillian could help her find out where he was. She had told her grandmother that Hernando was staying with some friends for a while to reassure her, since Mrs. Guerrero had a heart condition and excessive stress could be detrimental to her health.
“Hernando is a good guy, really,” she insisted, “but he’s struggled to deal with the loss of our parents, who died in a car crash last year. That’s why he started using drugs.”
In response, Cillian expressed sadness at their loss and insisted that he and Rose were devoted to get to the bottom of everything and that they wanted to help Sofia find her brother. As he said this, he noticed Rose looking at him with a caring expression on her face that gave him a pleasant, warm feeling in his chest. He asked Sofia to show them the warehouse where Hernando’s squad used to train, to which she agreed under the condition that she would bring them a block away from the place and then give them directions to find it by themselves, as she didn’t want to risk being seen there with them.
When Cillian and Rose arrived at the warehouse, they found it unlocked and completely deserted, like Sofia had a few days before. The only evidence that the place had been used as a training base for Hernando’s squad was the presence of dozens of graffiti tags and paintings alluding to glacier fighters, headhunters, and the Stigmata Man along the outer and inner walls of the building. Feeling dismayed, they went back to meet with Sofia on the corner where they had left her. Upon seeing their gloomy faces, Sofia guessed that they had not found anything. The three of them discussed their options and came to the dissatisfying conclusion that there was little more they could do at that very moment.
So in the end, they exchanged contact information and Sofia offered to escort them out of the South Side, as she knew of a route through an abandoned industrial park on the border between the South Side and the West Side that would probably enable them to circumvent checkpoints. As she was seventeen and had a restricted license, Sofia could take them to the industrial zone in her brother’s car, from where they would be able to enter the West Side on foot. Cillian and Rose thankfully accepted the offer, and soon the three of them were on their way north in Hernando’s rusty sedan from the early 1990s, Rose sitting beside Sofia in the front, while Cillian had taken the back seat.