Flight of Shadows: A Novel

by Brouwer, Sigmund

  Caitlyn thought of the letter she carried, rescued from the front seat of the Enforcer car. “He told me that before I was born, he had vowed to perform an act of mercy and decency and drown me like a kitten.”

  Emelia didn’t push Caitlyn to speak, simply waited, as if realizing Caitlyn had never spoken of this to anyone.

  Caitlyn closed her eyes, thinking about the nights, in her dreams, that Papa appeared. To rescue her from the destiny he had thrust upon her before she was born. To return to her what he had taken. Her trust and innocence.

  When her dreams took her to those childhood days in Appalachia—picnics with Papa, holding his hand, watching the hawks—she woke up happy. Loved. Secure. Just for a moment, until she realized where she was. Outside. Alone. Angry. Needing this anger to force away her fear.

  “His secret was my deformity,” Caitlyn said. She was tempted to strip down, to spread her wings, to show Emelia what Jordan had done to her. “He was a scientist. Before the war. I was an experiment. He betrayed me before I was born. He betrayed me by keeping it secret from me. He betrayed me by setting me loose.”

  The old woman made a humming noise as she lost herself in thought.

  Caitlyn found the noise comforting, but she found everything about the woman comforting.

  “What do they want from you?” Emelia asked. “Those who hunt you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And your papa—”

  “Jordan.”

  “And Jordan. He helped you escape from Appalachia but stayed behind.”

  Caitlyn felt her face twist in a bitter smile as she remembered the night of her escape. A clear, moonless night. Wind coming off the slope of the high ridge overlooking the perimeter fencing that imprisoned Appalachia.

  She’d been poised to leap into the night sky, to escape. Jordan had reached for her. She’d stepped away, knowing how much her rejection would hurt him. He had spoken, softly. “I love you as big and forever as the sky.”

  They both knew it had been his plea for forgiveness. Since she could remember, that was their game. “Caitlyn, how much does Papa love you?” And her answer: “As big and forever as the sky, Papa.”

  That night, on the ridge, with the wind waking her senses, with her arms and wings outstretched, she had simply needed to utter a single word in response. Papa. He would have known he was forgiven.

  Instead, in cold, blind anger at what she had learned about Jordan, she had leapt into the abyss, determined to reject him. But when her wings had made instinctive adjustments and she’d exulted in her destiny, found joy in flight, she finally called back, not knowing if it had reached him.

  “Papa.”

  It had been a cry of love and of forgiveness to set him free too.

  Some nights, waking from childhood dreams, Caitlyn hoped the wind had carried that single word back to him. So that he realized she missed her papa. So that he would always know she was grateful for the chance to flee her pursuers and alter who she was.

  Although she had escaped Appalachia, she could not escape her hatred of what he had robbed from her—the trust and innocence that had sustained her all through childhood. To the world she had been a freak, but not to him. His love had been the ultimate shelter. Until discovering why she was a freak and what he had hidden from her. Until understanding that when he made a choice not to drown her, Jordan had thrust upon her this fate. Alone and hunted.

  Most nights, then, she hoped he did not hear that last cry. So that, as childish punishment, she could take satisfaction that Jordan believed she was still as cold to him as in their final days together.

  She hated that she hated him. And hated that she loved him.

  “Your papa,” Emelia began, but Caitlyn cut her off again.

  “Jordan,” Caitlyn corrected her. “Jordan Brown. A scientist.”

  “He gave you no instructions?” Emelia asked.

  Caitlyn thought of the papers she always carried. One was a letter from Jordan to her, just before he’d abandoned her the first time. “We had agreed—the woman I loved and I—that as soon as you were born, we would perform an act of mercy and decency and wrap you in a towel to drown you in a nearby sink of water.”

  The other paper was a letter. Given the night she escaped Appalachia. With the name of a surgeon and how to reach him.

  “I was to visit a surgeon,” Caitlyn answered. “An old friend of his. The surgeon would remove my…” Wings, Caitlyn nearly said. But she caught herself in time. “… my deformity.”

  “Yet you haven’t.”

  “I haven’t,” Caitlyn said. “But I’ve decided. It’s time.”

  FORTY-TWO

  Razor loved illusion. Razor loved the irony of a truth in illusion and of an illusion in truth.

  In the hallway outside the hotel room, he decided he had less than three minutes to complete his next illusion. The street girl he’d left in the corner on a chair in Leo’s room was at least in her midtwenties. Easy conclusion: she was a survivor. Illegals didn’t live too far into their teens if they were not. Survivors were calculators and highly motivated by self-interest. Much as she might have pretended boredom, she had spent every moment in that chair thinking about the reward Melvin would pay for Razor’s capture.

  Right now, as Razor moved down the hallway, she was reaching for the phone. How much more ideal could it have been for her?

  Razor had left Leo blubbering in his blubber, tied to the bedposts. With Razor gone, Street Girl was in complete control. She’d cash in on the knowledge of Razor’s location while Leo shivered in his diapers. A quick call and Melvin would have Illegals on the street, waiting for Razor to step outside the hotel, ready to shepherd him into an alley, totally confident that no Influential would bother interfering.

  Razor had less than three minutes, but he only needed forty-five seconds. The time it took to ride the elevator a couple levels higher. He had a hotel card in his back pocket, one for another permanent suite under a different name. All told, Razor had a half dozen residences in the city, each stocked with chemicals of choice. He had plenty of chemicals to aid his illusion. To put together flashballs. To put people to sleep. And more.

  His first priority was the single biggest illusion of his life, granted to him by unmarked vials in a drawer in the bathroom alongside unused hypodermic needles and rubber tubing.

  Razor locked the door. With expert movements acquired through practice, he one-handedly wrapped the tubing around a bicep and made a knot that would hold. As his veins began to swell, he dipped the hypo into the vial, and sucked up a small portion of the drug. He kept his face blank as he injected it, then drew deep breaths of air into his lungs. He hated blood, even the sight of the tiny drops that would appear on his punctured skin. Or maybe he hated the sight of blood because of those punctures.

  He stared at the mirror for a full minute, almost in self-hatred.

  Then another deep breath to get ready for his next illusion.

  Beneath the sink was a toiletry kit that didn’t contain any toiletries. Instead, there was a latex mask with only a straw hole for the mouth. He took a small can of specialty paint from under the sink and set it on the counter. Then a straw. He checked his watch, and set an alarm for ten minutes later.

  When he pulled the tight-fitting latex over his head, his nostrils, eyes and mouth would be sealed.

  This was a familiar routine, but it still unnerved him, the five minutes of helplessness he would feel with only a straw for air.

  Slowly he pulled the tight, dark rubber over his head and onto his face.

  His first necessity was the straw. Eyes shut beneath the latex, he groped the counter for it and felt on his face for the hole that led to his mouth. He inserted the straw and sucked in air. The sound of it barely reached him because the latex mask also sealed his ears.

  Now that he could breathe, he patted and pulled at the latex to make sure it fit every contour of his face. It was a delicate task because of the pattern of open, curved lines in t
he mask that left slits on his chin, cheeks, and forehead exposed.

  Once he was satisfied that the mask was in place and held no wrinkles, he reached for the paint can and felt the nozzle with his fingertips to make sure it was facing him.

  He forced his tongue down on the straw to force it upward at an angle. If he accidentally sprayed paint into the open end, it would clog the straw and risk spraying paint into his mouth.

  The paint felt cool against his skin.

  With his tongue, he manipulated the straw to point downward and sprayed again, ensuring that there would be no pattern left from the straw at its upward angle.

  Razor waited, motionless.

  The paint would dry quickly. When the alarm sounded, he knew the paint would be like indelible ink, soaked and sealed into the pores of his skin. Granting him the power of yet another illusion—facial tattoos, with a registered bar code pattern that would make him indistinguishable from any of the Industrials who lived in the shantytown and migrated into the city on a daily basis.

  When he had no more need of this illusion, a special chemical solution would dissolve the tattoos and let him return to the illusion he cherished and hated the most.

  The person he called Razor.

  Fast, sharp, and dangerous.

  FORTY-THREE

  Outside, gusts of wind rocked the tin-roof shanty. Inside, grateful for the cooler air, bare from the waist up, Mason rolled onto a lumpy, thin mattress, supported a few inches off the floor by a slatted frame. He’d carefully placed his Taser and his shirt directly beneath him, in easy reach.

  Mason shivered. Not necessarily from anticipation. From memories of his time in the cave he had just escaped.

  Mason was terrified of the dark. Always had been. When he was a boy in Appalachia, his mother had locked him in a root cellar every time she needed to punish him. He never knew what act might deserve punishment. Something she’d laugh at one day would throw her into fits of rage the next. She’d strip him naked, drag him to the root cellar, and throw him down the steps. The door would close, leaving him on a clammy dirt floor, waiting for spiders and centipedes to begin to crawl toward him, and he would feel a scream start to build, knowing she was outside, listening, waiting to punish him further if he made noise, punishing him by adding extra time in the pitch-black root cellar among the molding vegetables and the smell of his own stale urine from the hours and hours he’d spent as prisoner of the hated darkness.

  Here, while there were enough cracks in the walls to send sharp beams of light in horizontal lines across the narrow shanty, it was dim enough to trigger that irrational claustrophobic fear, and the slashes of light barely kept those emotions at bay.

  His wandering eye was greedy—for the light and for what the woman was about to reveal, for she was still in the loose skirt and the shirt that had drawn him to this moment, and he could see enough to anticipate the next moments.

  Slowly and awkwardly, she moved to the bed, reaching out with her hands to find the edge of it.

  She sat beside him.

  “Can you close your eyes?” she asked. “If you watch me as I undress, it will seem dirty…”

  She drew a deep breath. “It’s just that I don’t do this. Other women take money, and I know you offered me money and I have to take it because that’s how my life is. You don’t understand how hungry I am and what it does to a person, but I don’t do this for money. I have my bowl. I have my spot there, near the path. There’s another area, where women stand, to sell themselves. I don’t do that.”

  “I’ll close my eye,” Mason said. “My other eye, remember, has a patch.”

  She reached for his face. He took her hand and guided it toward his patch. Her scent was slightly sour, but it made her seem more real. Her fingers touched and explored his face, stopping first at his eyes, then his lips.

  On his back, Mason discovered he was holding his breath, hoping she would not stop stroking his face. He realized what it was that had softened him toward her.

  Dark was her world. She was blind. She lived his terror.

  “How do you do it?” he asked her.

  “Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” she said. “I don’t want to talk either.”

  “No, no, no,” Mason said. Why did he expect her to read his mind? “Living without sight, I mean. No light. Ever.”

  She didn’t answer.

  Mason felt a need to fill the silence. “I couldn’t. I’ve got this eye. I lose it, and I lose everything. I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe in mercy. But if something were to take away my eye, I’d be in hell. I’d beg for mercy.” Mason hadn’t ever confessed a weakness to anyone. There was a certain buoyancy now, like the sensation of freedom.

  “I guess you live blind,” she said. “Or you decide not to live. What other choices are there?”

  “You asked if I was lonely,” she murmured. “Yes. Hold me first. Just for a little while.”

  He did, mentally exploring what tenderness was like. Maybe it was all right. Maybe it was a way to push back the dark. He closed his eye. He didn’t count the seconds.

  When she shifted and pulled away, it didn’t seem to break the spell.

  She stood and moved away from the bed. He was holding his breath again, waiting for the sound of her clothing falling softly from her body. Ridiculous, he knew, because she was blind, unable to know if he was, but he was keeping his promise. He did have his eye closed.

  But the sound he heard was the creaking of the shanty door.

  There was brightness against his eyelid.

  He turned his head, looking now, opening his eye, and saw silhouettes in the doorway, moving toward him. Lightning fast, because he was still a hunter, he twisted on the bed and reached down for his Taser.

  And couldn’t find it.

  Frantic, he swept his hand in all directions.

  Too late.

  Bodies fell upon him. Hands dragged him from the bed. Other hands rose, and against the light, he saw the outline of clubs. Now coming down.

  The blows, across his chest and head, drove the air from his lungs. Instead of fighting, he slumped. Didn’t resist.

  More hands against him, like the crawling of spiders long ago in the root cellar. The roughness of hemp. Until his hands and feet were bound. He kept his head down, letting it loll against his chest. Anything to give him an edge. And if it arrived, he’d erupt. Savage. Hateful.

  “It’s all under the bed,” he heard the woman say. “I pushed it back. Out of his reach.”

  “Lots, you think? I found a good one, didn’t I, Mommy?”

  Mason recognized the voice immediately. The little girl. They’d been working together. And the woman wasn’t blind. Not if she’d seen where he’d placed the Taser.

  “Whore!” Mason shouted. “Whore!”

  His anger wasn’t at her. But at himself.

  Nothing he could do. She’d warned him earlier that if he had anything of value, he’d be dead.

  Eye open, he counted five of them. Sunlight from the door was too bright a backdrop to make out any features.

  “He’s afraid of blindness,” she told them. “Take out his good eye. Let him live. Thinking he can come into our world and buy what he wants.”

  Snickering from the men who had him surrounded. One brandished a short knife and reached toward his face.

  Mason bucked against his bonds. A wild animal in a frenzy. He was fighting so hard that it took him a few seconds to comprehend that not all the screaming was his. And a few more seconds to realize he was no longer fighting anyone, only the bonds.

  He stopped his useless flailing and sat back, heaving for breath.

  The five men were on the floor. The woman and the girl gone.

  And someone tall and large standing above him with a Taser in one hand.

  The large man picked up the knife that had fallen from the hands of one of the attackers.

  “Let me cut the rope,” the large man said. “I’m here to help.”

&nbs
p; Mason rolled back, not trusting.

  “Everett sent me to follow you,” he said. “Told me to watch your back. Looks like you needed it. What were you thinking? Letting yourself get trapped like this? No tattoos on your face. There’s places you just don’t go out here.”

  Mason relaxed. Everett. This man wouldn’t know Everett’s name unless he was telling the truth.

  “I smell burning,” Mason said. “That was a Taser?”

  “When the setting is strong enough, it’ll torch hair,” the man said. “Might need a solar recharge after zapping all of them. A couple hours should do it. Not a lot of electrical outlets out here.”

  Mason accepted the man’s help with the bonds. When the rope was cut, he rolled over and searched under the bed. Found his shirt and wallet. Found his Taser.

  When he stood, the man Everett had sent was shaking his head. “They’d have cut you up and cooked the choice pieces by midnight. Old trick out here, putting in contacts that make it look like cataracts. I can see I’m going to have to stay pretty close.”

  Mason’s response was simple. He flicked the switch on his own Taser as he shoved it into the man’s chest.

  The crackling result was instantaneous.

  Mason had shot plenty of men before, and more often as not, it would take a couple of seconds for the body to fall. He’d see it in their eyes. A split second before comprehension, then another couple of heartbeats as the brain tried to fight the body, until shock overwhelmed the nervous system and the body collapsed.

  Here, the electrical charge exploded through the synapses, and the man in front of him had become nothing but meat, unguided by any thoughts or impulses.

  The man simply dropped.

  Nice weapon, Mason thought. And it had been a good situation to test it.

  Mason leaned down and tapped the man’s chest. Everett’s man was far beyond hearing, but Mason spoke anyway.

  “I hunt alone,” Mason said.

  He scooped up the knife as he left the shanty. After he’d found Caitlyn, who’d made him lose one eye, he’d come back and look for the whore who’d wanted to take the other and leave him blind.