Mason stilled himself completely. Whenever possible, back in Appalachia, at the beginning of the pursuit, he’d stand alone in the fugitive’s empty house, trying to put himself in the mind of his prey. Invariably, he’d look for soiled laundry. He’d crumple the clothing and push it up against his face, drawing in deeply the smell of the man or the woman he was about to begin hunting. Mason loved the sense of smell.
Here, it was a combination of urine and sweat, an animal smell that gave him shivers of adrenaline. There was more. A vague sense of burning plastic, mixed with foods cooked over open fires.
And hunger. He could smell hunger. Just like he could smell fear.
Buoyancy.
Then he knew.
Around him was freedom. In Appalachia, the people had looked free and happy. But only because the government told them that religion demanded that appearance.
Here, the people were free to be miserable and smelly, free to walk where they chose, even if those choices could only lead to more misery and stench.
Mason drew in a deep lung full. Smiled.
He’d been a bounty hunter in Appalachia. But there’d been no freedom in that. He was sanctioned by the government. His hunting did not involve any risk. It was like penning pigs and setting him loose among them with a rifle. Some pigs ran. Some didn’t. But none ever dared attack him.
Here, he had no protection.
It was just the opposite. He’d killed already, the two Christians who believed he needed their help. It was only a matter of time before the government here began hunting him.
He was truly on his own.
He realized he’d been wrong about this unfamiliar emotion. He had not been feeling buoyancy.
After a lifetime in Appalachia, he had just learned the sensation of freedom.
THIRTY-NINE
Cool. Wet.
Caitlyn woke to the sensation of a gentle touch to her face. Someone using a damp cloth. She was on her back.
Instinctively, she flinched and tried to roll away. No one touched her. Ever.
But there was no place to roll. No place to sit.
She realized she was in a horizontal chamber, like a coffin, but open only on the side. Her vision was filled with the outline of a woman, sitting on a chair, level with the chamber. Her chamber, then, was only a few feet off the ground.
“Easy, easy,” came a soft voice. “You are safe here. Under my protection.”
Caitlyn reached her hand to her jaw. She winced at her own touch.
“The men will apologize,” the soft voice said. “But only when you are ready. I sent them away, the idiots. You should rest. Relax.”
“I don’t know where I am.”
“Among us. Beneath the city.”
Caitlyn heard a sound she had not heard in a long time. Laughter from a child. It sounded like the child was running. She knew nothing about her surroundings or these people. But how bad could it be where a child’s movement and laughter were unhindered and unadmonished?
“I’m thirsty,” Caitlyn said.
“Would you like water?”
“Yes.”
“Then ask.”
I don’t like to ask anything of anyone, Caitlyn thought. Then she wondered if that was precisely why this gentle old woman had said this.
“Please,” Caitlyn said. “Could I have something to drink?”
The old woman reached down and, when her hand came up, passed across a plastic bottle.
Caitlyn wondered how she would manage to drink it. She was flat on her back. The chamber fit her so well that there was only six inches clearance above her.
Again, the old woman anticipated her thoughts.
“Are you well enough to roll out and sit up?” the old woman asked.
“I am.”
The old woman pushed back her chair, but remained sitting.
Caitlyn swung her legs out. With her feet planted, she twisted slightly and turned and stood but was faint headed. She leaned against the wall and breathed deeply.
“Idiots and morons,” the old woman muttered. “Trust me, they’ve heard from me what I think. But they’ll hear it again. What were they thinking, hitting you like that? You’ve been left under our protection.”
This room was barely more than a chamber too. Hard-packed dirt floor. A bare light bulb, softly glowing. Caitlyn looked back at where she’d woken. It was a coffin-sized hole cut into the wall. Blankets for a mattress.
It wasn’t the only bed space. Beneath that was another horizontal chamber. And above it another. The entire room was cut with these sleeping holes. All of them lined with blankets as mattresses.
The child’s laughter came from outside. Joined by another child. It sounded like one was chasing the other.
It was such a natural, joyous sound that it again countered Caitlyn’s foreboding at the strangeness of her surroundings. Such a bright sound in such a dark place.
Caitlyn opened the bottle. Clear plastic. In contrast to something as ancient in design as a spear of wood and sharpened metal.
“My name is Emelia.”
Caitlyn sipped at the water, then couldn’t constrain herself and gulped it until the bottle was empty, aware of the pain in her jaw with each slight movement. She nodded in gratitude as she studied the old woman.
Emelia’s stooped back almost brought a bitter smile to Caitlyn. Unlike Caitlyn, the old woman at least had a natural excuse for her hunched back.
Emelia’s head had sunk into her shoulders; gravity and age an enemy she could no longer push away. The wrinkles in her face had assembled in an expression of patient endurance. Her hair was held in place by a dark-colored scarf to match the formless dress over a squat body.
Caitlyn noticed, too, the old woman’s smell but couldn’t decide what it was. Smoke and animal grease?
“For how long?” Caitlyn asked.
“How long?”
“You said I was under your protection.”
“You are under Razor’s protection.”
“Who is he that you listen to him?”
She laughed. “He brings us money. Food. Medicine. He helps people in the shantytowns too. Razor is, well, Razor. Comes and goes. No one owns him. Does as he pleases.”
Caitlyn tried to fit this into what she already knew of Razor. It seemed like a contradiction, so she didn’t pursue it.
“How long am I here?” Caitlyn asked.
“Until the refuge is no longer needed.”
“There it is again. An answer that is not an answer.”
The old woman spoke softly. “You’re the one who came down here with Razor. He didn’t tell us why you need refuge or when he’d be back. You don’t know?”
“I don’t.”
Emelia said, “I want you to kneel beside me.”
There was such compassion in the woman’s voice that Caitlyn found herself obeying. On her knees, her head level with the older woman’s shoulders.
“Tired child,” Emelia said. “Whatever has sent you here must be a tremendous burden. I can see you vibrate with the effort to hold yourself together. You can’t live like this. You must not live like this. Let me hold you.”
No one touched Caitlyn. Ever.
But when the old woman put her arms around Caitlyn, she didn’t fight.
She closed her eyes. Breathed in the old woman’s smell. Allowed herself to be pulled in close.
And began to sob in great racking spasms.
FORTY
Moving along with the pedestrian flow, Mason was still trying to decide how best to discover the capabilities of a Taser when he felt a tug on the back of his shirt.
“Mister!”
He twisted, glimpsing a waist-high child moving to hide on the other side of him. He felt contact on his rear.
Mason growled and twisted again. This time, because of the patch on his eye, he lost sight of the child. So he swung violently, raking his hands across the air. His fingers made solid contact, and he was able to grab the child’s shoulders. He
pulled the child in front of him, where he could see.
A girl. Giggling. “Mister, you’re fast.”
“Go away,” Mason said. He pushed the girl backward. He glanced at the passersby, to see if they were going to interfere. They averted their eyes.
“Mister,” she said, smiling. Her face was streaked with tattoo lines. She pushed strands of hair away from her forehead. Her hair might have been blond, but it was too dirty to be certain. She was in bare feet. “I bet I can tell you where you got your shoes.”
“Bet what?” Mason snorted. She might have been six years old, if that. What would she have of value?
Then he snorted again. At himself. That simple question had trapped him. Now he was in a conversation.
“What do you want to bet?” the girl asked.
“Not interested,” he said.
“How about this?” The girl flashed a paper note. Looked new. Looked like one of the bills Everett had given him, Mason thought. He slapped his back pocket. Empty. He kept most of the money inside his shirt but had placed a bill there so, when he needed some, he wouldn’t have to pull out an entire roll.
“How about you give it back to me,” Mason said. “You don’t know who you’re messing with.”
“My name’s Thirsty,” she said. “What’s yours?”
“Nothing as stupid as Thirsty,” Mason said. “I want that money back. Now.”
The girl danced backward, frailty making her light on her feet. “Come on, mister. Bet I can tell you where you got your shoes. I’m wrong, you get this back.”
“It’s mine. I don’t need to win a bet to keep it.”
“Afraid I might know the answer?”
Mason took pride in his boots. They were the only thing remaining from his life in Appalachia. Black soft boots that were as comfortable as socks. First thing he’d done at Abe’s was rework and polish the leather to make them supple again after time in the river. No way the girl could guess he’d taken them from a fugitive he’d been forced to shoot in the back.
“You don’t know the answer,” he said, realizing he’d made another mistake by dropping the issue of the ownership of the money. But the girl was unafraid enough to be of some amusement value.
“We got a bet? Ready for me to tell you where you got your boots?”
Mason sighed. “It’s a bet.”
He stuck his hand out to win back his own money.
“Where you got your boots,” the girl began, then paused and grinned, “is right on the ground where you’re standing. Yup, you got your boots on the ground.”
“Very funny,” Mason said. He made a flicking motion with his hand. “Give it back.”
The girl giggled again and ran, darting between a couple of shanties.
Mason took a step in that direction, irritated. “Come back!”
“Don’t do it,” a soft female voice advised from the other direction.
Mason glanced over to identify the source. He’d missed her. She was sitting, cross-legged, just off the wide path, well below his eye level. The constant flow of people had obscured her.
“You listening?” The woman’s head was tilted slightly. She had long dark hair, brushed back. Her face wasn’t conventionally pretty, but seemed pleasant enough beneath the webbing of tattoos. “You hear me?”
“’Course, I’m listening,” Mason snapped. “I’m looking right at you.”
“Well, don’t chase her,” she said. “She’s looking to get you off the main path. If you go back in those shanties, about ten of them will drop on you. They’ll take anything you have of value and then kill and dismember you so that no one will ever know how and where you disappeared.”
Mason didn’t think about women much, not in the way he knew most men hungered for them. He wasn’t wired that way and didn’t care. His own hungers were more difficult to satisfy.
But he wasn’t blind to a woman’s physical attributes either. In Appalachia, women wore modest clothing. Always. This one, web of blue tattoos across her face, sitting cross-legged with a loose skirt, had on some kind of deeply plunging V-neck shirt, and she seemed careless about the exposure.
Mason moved closer, feeling a slight sense of shame for the view that his vantage gave him.
“You still there?” she asked, head tilted.
“’Course I am,” he said. “Right in front of you. You blind or something?”
Her chin dropped in a few inches of shame, and the silence was enough of an answer.
Then he saw a bowl beside her. With a few scattered coins in it.
Mason wanted to kick dirt. This was exactly why he avoided conversations. His life as a bounty hunter consisted of listening to lies or confessions or telling people what to do. Or better yet, uttering threats. He didn’t have much practice with conversation.
“Look,” he said. That led to another moment of awkward silence, this time on his part. He’d just told a blind person to look.
He started over. “It’s like this. I’ve got only one eye myself.” When he’d had two eyes, one always wandered and gave people the creeps, but he wasn’t going to admit that. “I wasn’t trying to insult you.”
She turned her face upward, and he noticed her eyes were creamy white.
“You sound like a nice man,” she said. “It’s all right. And I can tell you’re not from here.”
“How can you know that? You’re…” Mason let his voice trail off, embarrassed again that he couldn’t manage this conversation.
“Blind. I know. But Thirsty, she don’t try leading anybody back among the shanties unless they’re strangers. You don’t have a tattoo face mask either, do you? She wouldn’t have tried if you were one of us.”
“No,” Mason said. “I’m here looking for someone. They’re supposed to be at the Meltdown. I see smoke. I figure that’s where I need to go.”
“It’s a long ways,” she said. “You’ll need to pay attention as you go.”
“Don’t worry,” Mason said. “I’m good at paying attention.”
Especially right now. Given the V-neck on her dress, he couldn’t help his wandering eye from doing a lot of wandering. Most of the time, when he’d actually been with women, they hadn’t been too willing, but circumstances as a bounty hunter gave him a large degree of latitude in how he took his pleasure with them. Other times, much more rare, the women had been far too willing, drawn to Mason because of his reputation.
Here, there was something about the combination of the woman’s sadness and vulnerability that quickened his heartbeat. But he couldn’t take her like he’d taken others, and she wasn’t directly offering either. He didn’t know how to handle this.
“You seem like a nice man,” she said. “And I’m an excellent judge of character.” She pulled her bowl onto her lap, and it sagged into the material of her loose skirt. Mason had a flash of imaginary vision of lithe legs hidden.
“I’m not asking,” she said in a quiet voice, “but if you could spare a little for the trouble I saved you, I’d be grateful. I’m hungry. Real hungry.”
The words came out of Mason’s mouth before he fully understood what he was saying. “Are you lonely some too?”
FORTY-ONE
Later Caitlyn would learn that, unconscious, she’d been taken to what the Illegals in the subway called a sleeping chamber, where one or two families would retire each night, with every person allotted one of the coffin-shaped excavations in the side of the wall—like the ancient catacombs beneath Rome, with the difference being that living bodies occupied the resting spots, not corpses that the early Christians were trying to keep from cremation by Roman authorities.
Later, she would learn that the sound of laughing children came from a much larger chamber designated as a general communal living space. And later, she would understand more of the events that had forced the Illegals to literally carve out an existence beneath the city, driven into a life where the old subway tunnels served as thoroughfares to a network of tributaries and small territories of liv
ing chambers.
But for now, in Emelia’s comforting presence, all that was still a mystery to Caitlyn. Her sobs eventually subsided as the older woman stroked her head and murmured again and again, “Poor child.” Caitlyn found herself telling Emelia all that she’d held back and kept inside for as long as she could remember.
She told Emelia she had never gone to her papa—when she thought of her childhood, he was Papa to her, not Jordan—for this kind of comfort. Papa was a caregiver and kept her safe. But Papa wasn’t someone she brought her secrets to. All through childhood, isolated in the hills of Appalachia with her papa—Jordan—Caitlyn had always been adoringly shy, content just to be in his presence, so aware that she was different and so convinced that she was a burden to him that she was afraid to complain or even share the constant anguish that came with her deformity. She knew, always, that they were hiding in Appalachia because of who she was.
“He loved you,” Emelia said, after giving Caitlyn’s confession a long pause of respectful silence.
“He loved me.” Caitlyn had straightened by then and was out of Emelia’s arms. Kneeling near Emelia’s chair. At times looking straight ahead, at times into the old woman’s face. She ached for the days when it was that simple, daily life with Papa, just the two of them.
“A child must feel loved,” Emelia said after a pause. “Look around here. Humans were not meant to live the way we do. Some of the children haven’t seen sunlight. Ever. But you hear laughter. It is good that you were loved. It is better that you knew you were loved.”
“Papa loved me. He was willing to give his life for me. In Appalachia, when the bounty hunter and the dogs were close, he left me behind and drew the dogs. Later, he told me he didn’t expect to escape.”
“There is anger in your voice.”
“Jordan also betrayed me. Kept secret what I am. That’s why I’m here. Outside of Appalachia. Hunted. Alone.”
Emelia spoke softly. “He must have had his reasons.”
Flight of Shadows: A Novel Page 14