by Peter Clines
“Carefully danced around it,” Eli agreed.
“What does that tell you?”
“Sorry. What happened to him?”
She sighed in the dark. “What do you think? They killed him.”
“Ahhh. Sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“Thank you.” The shadowy blob of her blanket shifted again as another truck drove by back on the highway. “Get a good night’s rest. We have a long way to drive tomorrow.”
He felt a yawn build and let it out. After sleeping upright in seats for so many nights, the firm ground felt remarkably comfortable, and the blanket, luxurious. Sleep tugged at his eyelids and he welcomed it.
“Mr. Teague?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s Mrs. Pritchard. Not Miss.”
“Oh,” he said. He woke up a bit more and said, “Oh. Sorry.”
“I wanted to be sure that was clear,” she said. “I apologize for any confusion.”
“Yeah, of course.” He thought of asking another question, decided against it, and then sleep dragged him back down.
“Good night, Mr. Teague,” her voice whispered out of the dark.
17
The voices swam in, circled his mind, and prodded him awake.
“…not an average case,” said the faceless doctor, “but I believe all the grafts should take well.”
Fifteen nodded. “When will he be ready for fieldwork?”
“As soon as he wakes and has his orientation,” said the doctor. “And I believe he just woke up.”
Fifteen shifted his attention. “How do you feel?”
He wondered how they knew he was awake when he hadn’t moved or opened his eyes. He remembered something about people breathing differently when they were awake and wondered if he’d been snoring or something. Maybe he could get a little more sleep if he didn’t react. They might leave him alone.
Fifteen spoke again. “I know you’re awake. Please don’t waste any more time.”
He ignored the faceless man standing at the side of the bed with arms crossed. Ten more minutes would be a victory. It’d show Fifteen who…
How did he know where and how Fifteen stood when he hadn’t opened his eyes?
Why couldn’t he think of his own name?
Why couldn’t he open his eyes?
In the back of his mind, he remembered being forced to sign the contract. The scrawl of his signature. His heart speeding, his breath coming in fast gasps. He remembered the faint chemical smell of the gas as it hissed into the mask and he pulled it in through his nose.
Why couldn’t he open his eyes?
He flexed the muscles of his face, felt his cheeks and forehead tighten. His head thrashed side to side and he tried to rub his eyes against his shoulder. Straps pulled tight on his wrists and across his chest as he moved.
“This is normal,” said Fifteen. “There are always a few moments of panic at first.”
“My eyes—” he started to say, but his mouth was all wrong. His jaw felt stiff. His tongue stayed still. His lips didn’t…
Once he realized the screams were his, he stopped.
He turned his head to Fifteen. “Why can’t I remember my name?”
“The procedure involves some grafts and transplants,” the doctor explained. “Some things are moved. Others added. And still others removed.”
“But why can’t I remember my name?” He tried to adjust his face, to grit his teeth, but his features refused to move.
“You’re one of the faceless men,” said Fifteen. “You don’t have a name.”
“But I had one,” he said.
Fifteen shook his head.
“I did. I was…” It danced on the tip of his tongue. “My name was…”
“You don’t have a name. You’ll be assigned a number as identification is required, on a case-by-case basis.”
“So who am I? What’s my number?”
“You are Zero.”
“What?” He tried to sit up, and the straps pulled tight on his chest and wrists again.
“You are Zero,” repeated Fifteen. “Every faceless man begins as Zero to remind him he has no identity. Each of us is what we need to be to perform our duty, no more and no less.”
A grumble settled in the back of Zero’s throat, as did the awareness that he still had a throat. “You were Zero once?”
Fifteen nodded. “We all were. I have been Fifteen for the past eleven weeks. Before that I was Twenty-Three, and before that Eight, Sixteen, Four, and other numbers as circumstances required.”
“Zero,” he repeated. It tickled his mind, made the name on the tip of his tongue dance just a little harder. Not quite right, but close enough. “How can I see you?”
“You can’t. You don’t have eyes. You’re one of the faceless men.”
“But you’re right there.”
“Yes,” agreed Fifteen with a nod.
“So how do I know that if I can’t see you?”
“Through certainty,” said the faceless man.
“What’s that mean?” The phrase lacked something. A word he’d used all the time. A very flexible adjective. Sometimes a verb. One of his favorites.
“Have you ever walked through a familiar room at night? You can still move with confidence, step around objects, reach for light switches or remotes. Sometimes you even notice that something’s different.”
Zero nodded. “Yeah, okay.”
“That’s how we see. We are sure of everything, so we move with certainty.”
There was more to it, Zero felt certain, but he accepted the faceless man’s explanation. This felt out of character for him. Before, he would’ve demanded more. Demanded with the words he could no longer remember.
How much had they cut out of him?
Enough that it didn’t bother him. Not at the moment. He’d deal with it later.
“Let me up.”
“Let yourself up,” said Fifteen. “And be quick. We have work to do.”
Zero turned his attention to the straps that held him down. The buckles sat out of reach, just under the lip of the gurney. The straps…he remembered them as heavy canvas, but they seemed thin. Inconsequential.
He stopped struggling against the straps and just sat up. They popped and tore and dropped away. He reached down and ripped aside the lower ones with a sweep of his hand and swung his legs off the gurney. His feet hit the floor and he stood before the faceless man.
“Excellent,” said Fifteen.
Zero became certain of the frayed threads at the torn edges of the straps. And the ripples of the sheet on the gurney, also splattered with blood. And the tray of instruments, which had been pushed back. The twenty-one pieces of bloody gauze in a wire trash bin. The tank, which contained anesthetic gas. The green gauge on the tank, which had a black needle pointing precisely at the line after ¼. The hose on the tank leading to the rubber mask. Fourteen drops of condensation inside the mask.
The room leaned to the side, as if he’d had a few too many boilermakers. He tried to close eyes he didn’t have as more information poured into his mind. He grabbed the edge of the gurney behind him and willed himself to be as solid as it.
His level of certainty dropped. The glut of detail faded away. Zero straightened up.
Fifteen observed it all. He nodded. Then he turned away and walked out the big swinging doors. Zero followed him into the hallway.
They entered a locker room, and Zero went to a locker. It wasn’t his, he knew. He didn’t have enough of an identity to claim ownership of anything. Not anymore. But he understood the locker had been prepared for him, one of the many facts of which he was now certain. Arranged inside he found shoes, a shirt, and a dark-gray three-piece suit, almost black. Brown paper wrappers held black socks, a white T-shirt, and plain boxers. The tie was a deep red, like blood when it first swelled up from a wound. It had a pattern in the fabric to give it texture.
The vest took a lo
ng time. He buttoned it crooked on the first try, and it had a lot of buttons. At least as many as the shirt, maybe more. He almost tossed it back inside the locker, but such a show of temper didn’t feel right anymore. It’d been a long time since he’d had to knot a real necktie, but after his first attempt he became certain how the band of silk needed to loop and fold. He snuggled it against his throat and looked as sharp and badass as Fifteen.
Yes. Badass.
He left the coat on its hanger, closed the locker, and turned to Fifteen. “How do we get started?”
“You forgot your coat.”
“Are we heading out?”
Fifteen paused. “No,” he said. “Not yet. Why?”
“I don’t want to wear the coat inside,” he said. “I’ll be too warm.”
Again, his words felt wrong. Edited. They lacked the passionate emphasis he enjoyed.
Fifteen didn’t move, then nodded once.
They walked back into the hall side by side. Partners, even if Zero still needed to get his bearings. He took a dozen steps and had to set a hand against the wall. Knowledge of the hall poured into his mind. Details, history, facts flooded his consciousness. The wall was simple and solid. He tried to draw that solidity out of it.
Fifteen waited.
“It is,” said Zero, “a lot to get used to.”
“It is,” agreed the other faceless man.
They returned to the main room. Faceless men filled the space, every square foot of floor. Everything about them echoed and repeated. He could sense every iteration, pick out every detail of each version.
Zero tried to close his eyes again. Then he reached up and covered the front of his head with his hands. Nothing changed. He let out a frustrated grunt.
“It can be overwhelming,” said Fifteen. “All the new perceptions. The influx of information. I took almost two weeks to adjust. Some men take days, a few have needed over a month.”
“Okay.” Zero tried to take a breath. His lungs fluttered, his throat twitched, but no air flowed. He panicked, his heart raced, he tried even harder to suck in air, and then he remembered he didn’t have a mouth. His chest muscles spasmed and fought with his lungs.
He forced himself to straighten up, willed his chest and stomach to stop pumping at his lungs. He wouldn’t look weak in front of the new boss. He wouldn’t mess this up. Just like before a game. No nerves. No worries.
His body responded.
“You’re doing very well,” Fifteen said.
“Thanks. Thank you.”
Two faceless men moved past in the other direction, one pushing something. Zero sensed the angles, the closing gap, the pace of their strides, but he couldn’t turn the certainty into motion before his elbow connected with a heavy slap of muscle and bone. His body felt sluggish and clumsy as waves of unfamiliar sensory input hit him again and again. He managed to not stagger and kept himself alongside Fifteen.
Then someone behind him yelled, “Hey, nimrod!”
He stopped. Fifteen stopped next to him. They turned at the same time. Zero wasn’t sure who had started the move, if one of them followed the other.
The other two men stood a few yards away. Except there were three men. The two standing were faceless men, with a normal human—eyes, nostrils, mouth, hair—seated in a wheelchair.
Strapped in a wheelchair.
His new senses ebbed, swirled, crashed over him again, and Zero recognized the people who stood before him.
“That was me,” he said.
“Damn straight it was, moron,” snapped the man with a face. “Hittin’ a guy in a wheelchair?! What the fuck’s wrong with you? Watch where you’re going!”
Watch? Zero remembered being over there, on the other side of the conversation, where he hoped nobody would notice he’d told a man with no eyes to watch it. And he could sense the underlying panic, the fear that he’d gone too far, threatened a monster.
He was a loser.
Had been a loser.
“It’s not important,” Fifteen told him. “He doesn’t matter anymore.” The faceless man set a hand on Zero’s shoulder and applied pressure. It helped him focus and guided him away from the confrontation and deeper into the crowd.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” yelled someone behind him, someone who wasn’t important. “Hey, I’m talking to you, jackass!”
Zero tried to calm his thoughts as they thrashed in the churning waves of input. “Did you know that was us? Before?”
“Yes,” said Fifteen.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“What was there to say?”
“You could’ve told me not to hit him.”
The faceless man shook his head. “I couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because you hit him in the side of the head,” said Fifteen. “We both observed it and remembered it.”
“So?”
“You can’t avoid something that already happened. We’re not exempt from the rules.”
“But it hadn’t happened to me.”
“It had. Both sides. You saw it.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
Fifteen raised a hand to the room. “The history of the faceless men—of the country—is all happening right here, right now. All of it. It will happen. It has happened. We know all of the events and all of the outcomes. Especially here. We have certainty.”
The words brought all-new thoughts and facts to the surface of Zero’s seething perceptions. He grabbed them. Held on tight as they tried to slip back under the waves of input.
“Wait,” he said. He stopped and stepped to the left to avoid a pair of faceless men going the other way. “The dream. The American Dream. Our purpose. Did you know all along it was going to be stolen?”
“Of course we did. From the day the home office was founded. We know all the events and all the outco—”
“And you didn’t do anything? I would’ve had every version of every man here armed and standing around the thing.”
“Precautions were taken,” said Fifteen, “even with the potential risk to causality. They made no difference, as we knew they wouldn’t. The dream was taken.”
“That’s just pathetic.”
The faceless man’s head shifted. “Excuse me?”
“You knew a crime was going to happen—a crime against the United States—and you just let it happen. I think that’s the definition of pathet—”
Fifteen’s punch slammed into his chest. Zero slid back and crashed into a desk. The faceless men around him froze.
“Do not ever,” roared Fifteen, “think to question the ability or dedication of either this office or the men who serve it.”
Zero pushed himself back to his feet. “I was just saying—”
“You will say nothing!” Fifteen stalked forward and loomed over the smaller man. “You are nothing. Don’t forget that. You’re Zero for a reason.”
Thoughts and awareness and perceptions raged in Zero’s head. Blurry half memories of how he’d react to such words, even without the assault. Just recently, someone had taken an uppity attitude and he’d…why couldn’t he remember?
Part of him, a small part, screamed at the fact that he’d been lessened. They’d cut so much of him away, he wasn’t even sure what was gone. He had no context. He had less of everything.
He brushed the voice away. Or, as far away as he could.
The uppity person hadn’t even been important. A minor distraction in the past, before he’d become one of the faceless men. She’d only been important because of the reason he’d been recruited. The one thing he’d hung on to…
Zero looked up at Fifteen. “Where?” he said. “Where is Eli Teague?”
18
Eleanor’s tires spun, grabbed at dirt that had been pavement a moment earlier, and pulled them out of the second skid in as many minutes.
Eli’s stomach recovered from the lurch and took the moment to remind him he hadn’t had anything close to a solid meal since
the greasy biscuits at breakfast seven or eight hours ago. The grumble faded even as he steadied himself. How did time travel affect stomach clocks? Maybe that was how time travelers told time.
The cold hit him like stepping into a freezer, an abrupt drop of temperature. And it kept dropping. “Jesus,” he muttered, pulling his arms tight to his body.
“I did warn you,” Harry said. She wore a new shirt under her vest, an ivory one that buttoned up almost to her chin and had ruffles like an old tuxedo.
“You said it’d get cold. I wasn’t expecting high seventies to low twenties in half a second.”
“Be prepared, Mr. Teague. Don’t tell me you were never a Boy Scout.”
The road wandered through the forest like a drunk. It didn’t seem to be maintained in any way below the dusting of snow, just beaten down by years of travel. To emphasize Eli’s observation, Eleanor’s tires kicked up a rock that thudded beneath the floorboards.
A few miles off, at least a dozen thin columns of smoke curled up into the air. The smell of burning wood and coal reached through the cold air to tickle his nose.
Harry steered the Model A off the road and parked behind a cluster of tall weeds that probably could’ve been called saplings. Snow dusted their brown leaves and branches. They walked back to the road.
A few slow, lazy flakes drifted past Eli’s face. He’d known many days like this in Maine. Cold enough to snow and sap your heat, not quite cold enough for it to last. As a kid, it was the kind of snow he’d hated—not enough to cancel school or even to be fun when he got out of school.
He stamped his feet twice and rubbed his hands together. Like most New Englanders, he had a set of gloves and a spare wool hat in his car. His car was about a thousand miles away, though. He also guessed at least a hundred years would pass before it was actually built.
At least he’d kept his wool socks. And had real shoes on instead of sneakers.
He pointed at the smoke. “Is that it? Independence?”
She nodded.
“And we’re in 1850?”
“Unless I missed it, 1853. Independence is a challenging one. For about twenty years, it was the place tens of thousands of people wanted to be.” She tugged a cloak out from behind the bench and wrapped it over her frock coat.