by Dan Jolley
Tell’s hand had only brushed the .357 in his shoulder holster when something heavy struck him squarely between the eyes like a narrow battering ram. His knees turned to water, but the gray thing swept past him before he could fall.
The second shotgunner, an overgrown boy named Bryan Krago, stared at his broken hands and hissed out a litany of obscenities. He tipped sideways into the rubble and drew his knees up to his chest.
The two untouched members of Tell’s entourage had by now pulled their own guns, but they couldn’t tell at what to fire; one of them blazed randomly into the shadows, and Feygen felt a whap near one of his ears as a bullet sped past him. He tried to focus on the whirling gray thing across the theatre’s floor, but only got more confused.
Something like smoke moved among Tell’s thugs. Feygen thought it was human-shaped, but as he watched it seemed to flicker and dance, first in front of someone, then behind. A stray beam of light glistened off some kind of weapon, something oblong and narrow, and a series of fast hard sounds echoed through the demolished theatre, a machine-gun spatter of metal crunching into bone.
“Clarke...” Feygen murmured, unsure of his voice. He touched the wire, fumbled for it, shouted, “Clarke, there’s something here! Something’s in here with us!”
As Tell’s last two men fell bonelessly, one swiftly followed by the other, Bryan Krago rose to his knees, a .44 Magnum the size of his forearm clenched in one mangled hand. To his left, Curly-hair’s screams grew even louder, filled the night air, made it into a thick, tangible thing, and Feygen choked on the stink of garbage and cordite.
“Fuck you!” Krago screamed, and leveled his gun, and the mass of gray smoke turned and looked down the barrel.
Feygen saw in an instant of clarity what had torn through Maurice Tell and his helpers: a long, lean figure dressed head to foot in gray, segmented, form-fitting body armor. A tight gray mask clung to the head, and what looked like black mesh covered the eyes. A telescoping police baton rested lightly in one hand, blood dripping from the aluminum shaft.
The gray figure had to be at least six feet tall, but the shoulders, the chest, the hips… Feygen squinted, quickly certain: whoever was in that armor was female.
Bryan Krago had the woman dead to rights, point-blank, and opened fire after only half a second’s pause. The muzzle blasts lit the ruined theatre with a hellish strobe and the stink grew stronger, overpowering, the weapon’s report harmonizing with Curly-hair’s screams...
...and Feygen saw something happen.
Krago’s .44 would have required solid control under the best of circumstances, but with his hands damaged he had no hope of shooting accurately. The woman in the mask twisted backward into the thickest of the shadows as the gunfire roared around her, and then—between one flash and the next—stood behind Krago.
Feygen blinked and whispered, “Holy God.” His mind latched onto the image: Krago, on his knees, the woman behind him with the baton raised high like a dishonored samurai’s second, set to deliver the final blow of hara-kiri.
A sudden hot wind on Feygen’s face made his skin tighten.
The baton came down on Krago’s right elbow like a hammer, and for an instant the sickening crack of breaking bones overwhelmed Curly-hair’s screams. The gun flew from Krago’s hand and clattered to rest on the far side of a pile of weed grown bricks.
The woman hoisted Krago to his feet, paused half a second to glance at Feygen, and hauled Krago out of sight into the shadows.
The force of the woman’s stare, brief as it was, settled onto Feygen’s skin. For just that half a second he felt like a bug under a microscope.
Curly-hair finally ran short of breath and dissolved into sobs.
Feygen stumbled forward, ears ringing, and stared into the darkness where Krago and the woman had disappeared. He saw nothing—and then the entirety of the theatre flooded with light as Clarke and everyone else arrived. Powerful flashlight beams washed the alcove where Krago and the woman in gray had vanished, but they illuminated nothing but spider webs, dust, and tiny puddles of water sending wisps of steam into the summer night air.
Feygen knelt, and touched one of those puddles, and jerked his finger back with a pained hiss. The steam wasn’t rising because of the evening’s humidity. The water was on the verge of boiling.
Feygen snapped his head up at the sound of Chooley’s cries. He rushed over and found Chooley flat on his back, bleeding from a graze in his forehead. Feygen screamed for an ambulance.
* * *
Bryan Krago came to himself in a dark place, sweating and hurting and trembling violently. He gritted his teeth and strained to stop the shaking.
Krago half-lay, half-sat, propped against a brick wall, with cool smooth concrete underneath him. Groping around him, he touched something flat and rough propped against the wall next to him, and senselessly jerked his hand back. The sudden movement woke the pain in his right elbow, and he thought he could feel the ruined bones slide and click across each other. His vision tinged a crackling red, but he didn’t quite pass out, though his heart pumped sick sweat onto his pallid skin.
Krago blinked and attempted to focus into the black, but his eyes had no adjusting to do; they stared into total darkness. He moved to sit up, and another flash of pain ripped up and down his arm, jangled into his neck and down to his feet—and from out of the black, rough hands grabbed the front of his shirt, yanked him to a standing position and pinned him to the wall.
A match hissed into life near his eyes, making him flinch and squint. The masked face floated inches from his own, alien and nearly featureless, and alongside the pain and the cold Krago still found room for fear.
Trying not to vomit from the agony in his arm, Krago thought he could make out eyes through the black mesh in the mask. He tried to talk, but the only thing that came out was a whimper, so he clamped down again and tried to salvage a few scraps of self-control.
Christ, his elbow, he didn’t know there could be pain like that.
The gray figure held him pressed against the wall for several more seconds and let the match burn down. When the small gold flame drew near the gloved fingers, the figure spoke in a voice like skittering autumn leaves.
“Next time I catch you, I break a lot more bones.”
Holy fuck, holy fuck it’s a woman, a woman did this to me—
The woman waved the match out and, as the darkness returned, pushed Krago backward. Instead of grinding into abrasive brick, Krago felt himself fall into a space like the inside of an oven, and for one horrible instant knew he was about to burst into flame.
Consciousness lost him.
* * *
Feygen and Chooley stood near what had once been the back entrance of the Hargett Theatre, lit alternately in red and white as the EMTs hauled away Maurice Tell and the three hired guns they could find. Eleven other police officers were on the scene now, and one of them, a thickset man with a large, square head and dark eyes, talked to Feygen in quick, brittle tones. Chooley sat down heavily, a thick gauze pad pressed to his head. He’d be leaving in an ambulance soon.
“So you’re saying Tell’s guys had you cold?”
Chooley scratched his nose, darted his eyes around like a rabbit. Feygen couldn’t tell if he felt the pain from the graze or not. Chooley said, “We could’ve made it. No problem. No problem. Plenty of cover round here. I mean, the deal went all to hell, yeah, but we could’ve made it.”
Feygen snorted. “We were dog food.”
The thickset man, Clarke, eyed Feygen sourly. Chooley kept talking.
“As soon as they pulled their guns, man, the chick was right there. Right there.” Chooley squinted into the shadows and trembled. “We might’ve walked away from here, and we might not, but that wasn’t even an issue once this bitch showed up. She just waltzed through those stiffs like...I dunno...like they were just standing there.”
/> Clarke swept his eyes around the theatre’s decayed interior. “And what did you say happened to the fifth guy?”
Chooley turned to Feygen and said, “You tell him. You tell him. What happened, you tell him.”
Feygen shook his head. “I don’t know. This woman, this woman dressed up like a fucking ninja, she carried the last guy off. I don’t know where they went.” He knew what he’d seen, but he still couldn’t believe it. Chooley’s corroboration wasn’t very comforting.
Clarke turned and started to say something when a heavy thud sounded behind them. Spinning around, they saw Bryan Krago lying sprawled across the hood of one of the ambulances.
Krago slid slowly off and crumpled to the ground, where the EMTs swarmed over him.
“Where the fuck did he come from?” Clarke shouted. “Get me lights! Lights, you shitheads, get me lights over here!”
The area around the ambulance, which had parked near enough to a wall for the shadows to be particularly deep along its side, immediately lit up with high-intensity beams. Feygen wasn’t very surprised when the only thing they illuminated was a patch of paint on the hood that had bubbled up. He watched as one of the bubbles popped.
A scorching-hot breeze touched his cheek, and he flinched.
* * *
A short while later, in a place with no windows and no doors, Janey Sinclair concentrated.
Not bad for the first night. Not bad at all.
A pair of gymnastic rings hung from one of the steel girders crisscrossed over her head, and she gripped them, her body suspended between them, arms straight out from her shoulders in a position called the “Iron Cross.”
Janey replayed the scene in her mind for the fortieth time. Gauged her reactions. Analyzed her judgments. She’d saved two lives: an undercover cop and, near as she could tell, a cooperating junkie. Not bad.
A leather gauntlet encircled her left forearm, seven slim throwing spikes nestled beneath thin straps. A leather sheathe held a telescoping police baton to her right thigh. She breathed slowly. Camouflaged beneath the Vylar suit, Janey’s muscles stood out in forced tension, perfectly steady, each one burning and hard as steel. Janey brought her eyes into focus and willed the night vision on.
She looked across a large chamber, a cavernous space composed of smooth concrete floors, unadorned cinder block walls, and pure, smooth darkness. No light burned—no lamps, no flashlights, no silver streaks of moonlight allowed entry by high-placed windows or ill-fitting doors. Janey’s space—she thought of it as her basement—was dark and seamless, with no entrance or exit save for a few narrow ventilation shafts.
Janey questioned her decision to bring one of the thugs here. She was confident the basement was inviolate, and she’d terrified the poor bastard even more thoroughly than she’d hoped to, but it bothered her. An unnecessary risk.
Thirty feet away stood a stack of hay bales supporting a shooting range target: a man’s head and torso in black. Concentric outlines radiated from the heart.
Through the darkness, Janey’s eyes ignored their need for light and saw the target with perfect clarity. She hung, arms parallel to the floor, teeth gritted, and began reciting the alphabet backward. Z, Y, X, W...
If she had turned her head, she would have found herself looking at one of a series of oil paintings that lined the basement, propped against the cinder blocks. All unframed, they were simple canvases expertly stretched over hand-built wooden frames.
Every one was a masterpiece.
No one would ever see them.
When she sent her bio and sample PDFs to Ben Gault at the Slade Gallery, against her better judgment she included one of what she thought of as her “angry” paintings, more to see what would happen than in hopes of displaying or selling it. It was a piece called “Consumption.” She thought the effect might be lessened, since it was just an image file rather than the real thing.
Ben Gault called Janey the next day and asked if he could come and see Janey’s work in person. Janey readily agreed, but Gault sounded strange, and Janey asked him if anything was wrong.
“No...no, not exactly,” Gault said. “I think, though, I can safely ask you to leave ‘Consumption’ out of the works I see today.”
“Okay. Why, if I may ask?”
Janey knew why, but this was the first time anyone had seen any of the paintings “Consumption” belonged with, and she wanted to hear the official response.
“Well...my wife and I both had nightmares last night after we saw the PDF. I don’t think that particular piece fits in too well with the Slade Gallery’s image. That’s, of course, not to say I don’t want to see the other ones.”
Gault sounded stuck somewhere between fear and admiration, with a healthy dose of capitalism thrown in. The paintings could make the gallery a tidy sum, and both he and Janey fully realized it. Janey gave Gault a time to come over.
Counting the one finished that morning, Janey had completed one hundred seventy-three paintings that she felt accurately represented her mood at the time of their execution. Ninety-four of those, like “Consumption,” had turned out unsuitable for public viewing. So they wound up here. In her basement.
S, R, Q, P...
Of the paintings which actually had been displayed, much was said. Critics drew comparisons with Friedrich, with Goya; her work, according to the Journal-Constitution’s reviewer, “made occasional use of Dali’s talent for the photo realistically surreal.” Janey had no comment, and attended the initial showing only reluctantly. Her first sale, a four-by-six oil titled “Original Virtue,” moved at the show for sixty-five hundred, an unprecedented price for a new artist. Janey graciously thanked the buyer, declined invitations to several parties, excused herself from the advances of a slender blonde in a push-up bra, and went home as soon as she could.
That was months ago, and since then her paintings had sold with astonishing regularity. Ben Gault had politely suggested on a couple of occasions that Janey sign on with the Slade Gallery exclusively, but Janey hadn’t given him an answer yet. She’d probably say yes.
K, J, I, H...
Sometimes she wondered what Adam would have thought if he could have seen her like this. He used to comment on her body, an even mix of teasing and seductive appreciation. If he could see her now...
She grimaced. If Adam could see her now, she wouldn’t be trying so hard not to think about Tim Kapoor.
If Adam could see her now, well, that would change a great number of things, wouldn’t it?
D, C, B, A.
Still hanging, still in the perfect Iron Cross position, Janey took one breath slightly deeper than normal. With a grunt, she flipped around and launched herself off the rings, circling high and forward into the air. Spikes whistled out in a pointed whirring rain and made small tapping sounds as they punched through the paper of the target and into the densely packed hay behind it. Janey landed, rolled, and came up to a crouch, the baton extended and ready in her hand.
She held that position for a moment. Slowly Janey stood, collapsed the baton, and approached the target. One spike protruded from the center of the target’s chest. Another had planted itself squarely in the target’s right eye. Janey stretched, unzipped and pulled off the Vylar mask, holstered the baton and plucked out the spikes.
The paintings lined up around the walls of the enormous room broke their chain at one point to make space for a nineteen-foot-long segment of pegboard festooned with hooks and metal clips. Each of them held a melee weapon. Three different styles of police batons, bo staffs, brass knuckles, tonfas, hanbos. At the top of the board, separate from the rest of the weapons, hung an authentic Japanese katana. That was the only one Janey never considered using. It had belonged to her father.
Janey walked slowly over to the board, replacing the spikes in the gauntlet as she went, and unbuckled both the gauntlet and the baton sheath. Each item went on a
separate hook. The baton she took to a small work table, in front of which sat a three-legged stool. She opened a gray metal tool box on the table, took out the various necessary items and began to clean the baton.
All of this she did in perfect darkness.
On the wall above the work table Janey had tacked a poster. Old and slightly wrinkled, it was a promotional bill for a Las Vegas-style lounge-act magician called The Astounding Alexander. Alexander appeared in the poster as a tall, thin, graying Caucasian man in his forties, clad in a red tuxedo with a black cape. An assortment of objects seemed to float in the air around his head and his grandly gesturing hand. Janey ignored the poster as she worked.
Throughout the vast chamber, the only sounds were those made by Janey’s tools. Aerosol spray and cloth buffing lightly against metal.
When she finished, she stood and began pulling off the Vylar suit, but paused for a moment to run her fingers over its unique texture. Janey never quite tired of the sensation. Vylar, she remembered, was “composed of millions of tiny octagons, woven into a cloth with monofilament wire threaded through holes drilled by a precision machine press.” The suit gave her peace of mind to a degree, though it had a tendency to chafe under the chest and back pads. She occasionally wondered if the military ever noticed it missing from its vault—or what they’d do to her if they ever caught her with it.
Not that they ever would.
“Got to buy some longjohns,” she said aloud. The nights’ temperatures would drop soon enough, and the last thing she needed was a cold. Particularly after tonight. After success.
Janey sat on the floor to unbuckle the steel-toed, leather-and-Vylar boots, and with a sort of rush realized how good it had felt, how good it still felt, saving those men’s lives. Feygen and his informant, “Chooley,” whose names she had overheard while listening from the shadows, could go home to their lives now. To their families, their children if they had them. And they could do it because of her. Janey wrapped her arms around her knees and rocked back and forth for a moment.