The Snow Swept Trilogy

by Derrick Hibbard

  Keep movin' before the devil gets ya.

  Who had said that? Was it Nick, the bus driver who was now dead? He couldn't remember, his mind empty of everything but survival. He reached the side of the car opposite Morales, and pulled himself into a sitting position, his back to the tire. He didn't think Morales had a clear shot, but it wouldn't take long for the cop to move into a position in which he could finish Paul.

  Keep movin'

  His leg was bleeding, his pants completely soaked in blood, and Paul couldn't look at his leg. He wanted to scream, to bite down on his fist and scream, but Morales would kill him.

  Distantly, as if a million miles away, he heard the elevator doors ding open. In the same instant he made the decision to move, hoping that Morales would be distracted for at least a fraction of a second.

  Before the devil gets ya.

  He moved, rolling over his dead leg and pulling himself up on his good leg. He pulled himself along the car, seeing the same doctor who'd just left the garage a moment before exit the elevator, returning to her car as if she’d forgotten something.

  A look of confusion, and then downright terror, crossed her face. She screamed and ducked away just as a bullet struck the concrete to her left. Paul was around the side of the car, his bleeding leg scraping across the concrete behind him and leaving a trail of blood. Morales had his back to him and was getting to his feet as Paul tackled him from behind. He threw his entire weight into the tackle, coming down on Morales and driving his head into the concrete.

  Paul saw his chance and took it, punching as hard as he could at the widening circle of blood on Morales' bandaged shoulder. Morales screamed for just a second before the pain over took him and he lost consciousness.

  Before the devil gets ya.

  Paul had maybe seconds before Morales woke up, so he had to move.

  Move, move move, he thought, the mantra running over and over in his head. Before the devil gets ya. He snatched the fallen briefcase and it fell open, papers fluttering free and scattering across the grey concrete. He shoved a few back into the case and slammed it shut. He didn’t have time to grab more. He had to move before Morales woke up. Even in a dazed state, Morales would overtake him, and he'd be dead.

  Paul crawled towards the elevator. The doctor was in there now, crouched in the corner and crying.

  "Hold the elevator!" Paul screamed. "Please!" He half crawled, half dragged his body to the open door. The woman hesitated, then stuck her leg between the closing doors. His leg was numb now, the throb a dull ache, and the daze was settling over him.

  He reached the elevator, and the doctor helped him inside. The doors were closing again, and they both saw Morales lifting his head from the concrete.

  The doctor noticed Paul's bleeding leg and her fears slipped away as habit took over. She ripped the belt from his waist and wrapped it just above Paul's knee. Paul was fading quickly, the adrenaline rushing out of his body as quickly as it had rushed in, shock taking its place.

  The doors opened on the lobby. Several people nearby saw the bloody mess and the screaming began.

  No more than two minutes went by before the SWAT team arrived, called in response to the shootings of the police officers and nurse, and the missing detective, Robert Morales.

  Half the team went upstairs, and the other half went to the garage. When they got to Parking Level 2, all they found was the trail of blood from Paul's leg.

  Morales was gone.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The car, a black and sleek Mercedes, arrived to collect Mae and Ryan from the airport. She was amazed at how quickly it had come after his phone call, but deep fatigue was setting in too quickly for her suspicions to be aroused.

  "You can take the backseat, all to yourself," Ryan said, holding the door open for her. "No funny business."

  "I can't pay for a hotel." Mae said, sleep already invading her words. Ryan just smiled at her and shook his head. She climbed inside the car and leaned her head against the cold glass of the passenger window and felt the sleep overtake her. The urge to shut her eyes and allow the world to drip away into nothing was powerful—too powerful to resist.

  Who was Ryan, really? she wondered, and then the all important question: could she trust him?

  As it had done since she was only a child, her mind naturally went to that place with paper and ink. As always, it started with a single line, drawn down the middle of the page. As she slept, her muscles twitched with the memory of the way the pen felt in her fingers, and her hands moved with the swift and smooth movements of putting ink to the clean white page.

  Paper and ink, here and now, she dreamt. Her dream was as natural as it had ever been, and the movements of her hands and muscles flowed from her body as if it were made to draw these lines and open the door to reality.

  As always, the line appeared on the page, a split in reality, and the world opened before her. The ink was black, but as the world opened, light and color flooded through, like a door opening from a dark interior to the bright day outside, or eyelids opening after a deep sleep. The colors swept in from the black line of ink, and the picture before her took shape with every etch of ink on the blank paper.

  The world opened on a darkened city street in the wake of spring. Trees lined the streets with buds of pink blossoms opening, a sepia tone in the yellow light of the street lamps. The ground was damp from an evening rain storm, and the smell of the water coming off the cobblestones sent a ripple of pleasure through her body. She whirled in the night, her feet tapping against the ground and splashing through the puddles. She crossed to the bridge and looked down into the churning river. She didn’t think of the river that’d held her in its grasp only hours before, but admired the deep blue of the water with flickering yellow light reflecting off like faraway stars in the deep blue of a night sky.

  The air was still cool, but warm enough to be a respite from the harsh winter, and it touched her skin and whispered through her hair. She closed her eyes and felt the moist breeze on her face and tasted the remnants of rain.

  She looked around and saw that she was alone, except for a group of people sitting outside a café down the street. Men and women, and even the waiters and waitresses, pulled chairs and tables together, and they laughed at each other’s jokes and stories, and swayed to the jazz music that melted through the night. Not a single person looked her way, as their party was in full swing, and it was here and now and nowhere else.

  She sat at a table, not minding the cold, wet seat. She sat and watched the party play on down the street and listened to the faint bursts of horn and percussion. She watched the windows in the buildings above the street, some dark or covered with curtains, others glowing with yellow lights. A string of drying purple lavender hangs above one window, with a child’s play clothes hanging from a clothesline above another.

  Footsteps echod along the stone street and brick buildings, and she hears them laughing before they turn the bend and approach the bridge. She smiles when she sees them, the boy with a jacket and scarf, his arms around the girl’s shoulders. Their laughing breaths make short bursts of mist in the night air, and her smile grows.

  Her notebook is open on the table before her, never mind the wet tabletop, and she draws. First the black line from top to bottom, then the bridge that spans the river, with its cobblestone surface and ancient stone railings.

  She draws the boy and girl. They are speaking melodic words that she doesn’t understand, but she wants to understand. She is telling him that she loves him, and he her, and their words are soft and belong only to them, and she asks him, “What is this love, that makes me love? Ce que l'amour est cet amour?"

  He touches his forehead to hers and she steps up on the tips of her toes to kiss his chin, and his cheek, the corner of his mouth, and then his lips. She doesn’t understand, but she wants to understand.

  They stood on a bridge, not too far from where she sat drawing and wishing and hoping. They stood on the bridge that overlooke
d a river that cut through the center of an old city. The boy held the girl's hand, and she laughed, and he laughed.

  Mae put the pen down, and the picture was done. She watched the worn wooden benches and the potted plants and the clapboard signs that were put away for the night. Nothing moved, nothing floated upward in the air, not even the petals on the fading flowers that sat in a window box just outside the nearest shop.

  That was good. Her mind was clear and focused on the boy and the girl. She smiled, and with the pen on the paper, paper and ink, the world closed to her, and she slept.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Detective Morales exited the hospital parking garage and began driving fast. His head and body ached, but he didn't care. He screamed as he drove, pounding his fist into the steering wheel and the dashboard. The red rage was turning black.

  Morales had minutes to disappear before all police cars would be on the lookout for the reporter's car.

  He swore, spittle spewing from his mouth.

  A few miles from the hospital, he pulled into a residential neighborhood, turned down a few streets, and pulled into the driveway of a darkened house. He turned off the car and waited to see if any lights would turn on inside the house, but none did.

  Morales dialed a number from memory and waited until he heard that the connection was made.

  "I need a car, at current location, and disposal of current vehicle," Morales said, and waited while the operator on the other end tracked his phone.

  "Estimated time of arrival is 23 minutes."

  "Great." Morales hung up the phone and closed his eyes. He concentrated on calming the anger, but could only think about how had it all gone so wrong tonight. Every step of the way he'd been thwarted, and the failure tasted bad in his mouth.

  He picked up some of the crumpled papers that had fallen from the briefcase, papers he'd grabbed from the floor of the garage as he escaped. He was glad to see that most of the information was marked out. That stupid, meddling journalist wouldn't get far, but Morales had decided to kill the reporter regardless.

  Near the bottom of the stack of papers, Morales came across some information on Mae's current whereabouts. Turns out that a woman at the airport had filed a complaint that her passport and credit cards were stolen, a woman named Gertrude Pettingale, who had been on her way to visit her boyfriend in California.

  A second ticket had been purchased for Ms. Pettingale, a multi-destination ticket with its first stop in Hartford, Connecticut.

  "Ah," Morales said, feeling a bit elated at the news. "So you're going home."

  He thought for a moment, recalling names and faces in his mind. It didn't take long. He opened his phone again and dialed a number that would connect him with a different operator, one who handled the directory of sleeper cells. When the connection was made, he requested the number of a particular cell, one who'd been sleeping for some time now. The operator patched him through, and the dial tone rang.

  Morales waited for three rings before the other end was picked up.

  "Hello?" The young man on the other end didn't know exactly who was calling him so late in the night, only that it was his employer. He also would have known that the call would not have been made unless his employer had some urgent business for him.

  "The girl," Morales said.

  "I understand." The young man's voice fresher now and more alert.

  "I'll need a report as soon as possible," Morales said.

  "Yes, sir."

  Morales ended the call and smiled. Finally, Mae had played into their hands, as they'd known she would do eventually. He leaned his seat back a few inches and shut his eyes to sleep for a few minutes before his replacement car arrived. Oh Mae flowers, April showers, he thought as he drifted off to sleep, how stupid you are. And soon you'll be dead.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Mae's eyes fluttered open and closed when she heard talking, but she fought the urge to just stay asleep,. She wondered if Ryan and the driver were talking, but the conversation sounded more one-sided. Finally, she pushed the sleep away for just long enough to hear Ryan talking into his cell phone.

  "Yes, sir," he said, and then the call had ended. She sleepily wondered what that had been about, so late at night.

  She leaned against the window, watching the snow falling beneath the yellow streetlights, and for the first time in many years she felt warm and safe, like she'd felt as a child snuggling beneath heavy blankets with blizzards raging outside. They passed farmhouses among the rolling hills, and even though the windows were closed, the smell of chimney smoke spiced the air. She remembered quiet moments on cold winter nights, laughing and eating popcorn, the crackling wood in the fireplace, and howling wind outside.

  They will never stop hunting you, her mother had said so long ago. Move, before the devil catches you, the bus driver had said, but he had died protecting her. Now Ryan would be killed. They had found her and they would shoot him as they carried her away.

  She turned and looked up through the car's moon roof, sleep once again taking her.

  They will never stop hunting you. The words echoed from far away, warning her of something that wasn't quite right, and Mae thought she smelled Ryan's cologne, a spicy sweet smell that made her heart flutter.

  Mae stared up at the dark winter sky, the twinkling stars, and snow falling.

  Part Four: Aftermath

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Heather stared at her computer screen and watched the progress of the clean-up and emergency crews. She couldn't watch what was happening with a camera, of course, but she monitored the radio frequencies and cell phone triangulation, and the streaming data became almost as good as an image.

  She hated it when people died during the games, but at least three of the players had gotten out alive. She had to remind herself that these people did what they did because they wanted to. She told herself again and again that while she was the one who organized the games, she saw a way for a lot of people to make money and improve the world at the same time, the players in this game had been playing for a long time before she showed up on the scene.

  But the guilt persisted. She studied the flowing data stream and saw that Sam was already in the ambulance, being taken to a nearby hospital. At least he was alive, she thought, knowing that he had a wife and a new baby at home. The wife--she thought her name was Dani, but couldn't remember--would of course have no idea where her husband was, or how he'd been so hurt.

  Those were the rules. But just like everyone else who played the game, Sam’s wife benefited from the risk and Sam's injuries in the games. Hazard pay, after all.

  She hit a few keys on her keyboard and pulled up the Lit Dragon payment account and sent payments to each of the players. Heather checked her own account to make sure that money had been deposited into her account as well.

  She leaned her head on her keyboard and breathed deeply, allowing the stress to flow out of her. After a few moments, she turned back to her computer and navigated to the VPN portal that routed her computer through seventeen different countries, then plunged into the Deep Web where she felt most at home. She got lost in that space between computers, amidst the data that was unsearchable by normal means, not paying attention to the time. Several hours passed before she even thought about going to bed. She was tired and had to teach a class early the next morning.

  Heather's computer suddenly emitted a soft chirp, and the message bar on the bottom of her screen began to flash a burnt orange color. She moused over the flashing bar, and saw that she'd received a message from DukE_of_DarkNEss_83.

  u there?

  Heather tapped the message and a window appeared on her screen. She clicked the box and typed:

  Yep.

  DukE_of_DarkNEss_83

  How was the event this evening? Any casualties?

  ANONX^17

  One dead. Sucks.

  DukE_of_DarkNEss_83

  Sucks. r u okay?

  Heather looked out the window of h
er third floor apartment at the boring courtyard beyond. A playground stood alone in the darkness, a swing gently rocking back and forth in the night breeze. She wished for the sounds of kids playing outside; it was too quiet at the moment. She didn't want to think about the player who had died, and had spent the last few hours doing her best to drop it from her mind.

  And now, the Duke of Darkness wanted to talk about it. She didn't blame him, and supposed that most good guys wanted to listen and take care of their friends. In truth, the Duke was one of those good guys, really the total opposite of darkness. He was a single guy in grad school at a university out west, and one of the more talented hackers that Heather had ever met in the digital universe. Of course, she'd never seen the guy, didn't even know his real name (although that wouldn't have been terribly difficult to find) but she imagined him to be a smallish guy with narrow shoulders, always draped in a button-down shirt that was tucked into neatly pressed jeans. He would be wearing thick rimmed glasses, which framed his pale complexion. She pictured him sitting alone in his apartment, sipping hot chocolate as he worked his magic. And magic was the right word for what the Duke did. He ran a website with a group of fellow socially-minded hackers, called Wiki-Bust. They used their incredible combined talent to bypass whatever firewalls or protections stood in their way, uncovering whatever they determined to be unsavory to society and posting it for the world to see. Their most recent bust was the bribing of an Italian judge in an internationally-known murder case. And they didn't stop with the bribery; they also exposed the judge's ties with crooked politicians, and the European drug trade. The Duke and the hackers at Wiki-Bust were ruthless, but always objective in who they exposed. They ousted tumors on society, individuals who threatened the common good.