by Jon Steele
A glob of ash gathered at the back of her throat. She coughed, leaned over, and spit. She wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve.
“Anyways, I was still a little dopey then, going to town after the bad shit happened, I mean. Otherwise I never would have gone, not if I had half a notion what I’d find there. I knew the killers were . . . well, I know they weren’t human. Anne told me the truth about the killers the day the bombs went off in town. She called the killers goons. And when she told me, I remembered I’d seen them before at Lausanne Cathedral a long time ago, and there was someone there who called them goons, too. Did I tell you about the cathedral already? I can’t remember if I did . . . Hold on a sec. This fucking ash hurts my throat.”
She took a long drink of tea.
“In town there’s a hardware store on a corner—you know the one I’m sure—and I went in and helped myself. Tools, tarps, gloves, rope, Wellington boots because my trainers were soaked with blood. The boots were a size and a half too big, but with the three pairs of work socks I stole, they fit all right. I stole a bunch of cleaning stuff, too. A couple pieces of lumber, some saws and hammers and nails. And I went back in the street and started walking through the dead to go home. Then I remembered that last day again, when bombs killed everyone. I remembered seeing Molly’s body lying in the street, her head was somewhere else. I couldn’t leave her that way. I thought she deserved to be buried, too. And as I had just stolen all the tools I needed, I thought—I know it’s awful—Dead people all over the street and I’m choosing to take care of just her, but that’s what I did. I picked up her body and put it in the wheelbarrow, then I found her head and did the same thing. It was weird, you know? The wheelbarrow never seemed to fill up, no matter how much I put in it. Like a dream . . . but it was real. I remembered there was this little park at the edge of town. I thought she’d like to be buried there. Then I thought perhaps she’d like to be farther away from the town so she wouldn’t have to look at it. No, that’s not it. I felt like I could hear her telling me she didn’t want to be buried in town. I know it sounds strange, but that’s the way it felt. Take me to the park, honey, she said in my mind. And when I got to the park she said, Take me into the forest. So I did. I was having a conversation with a dead person. I kept asking her, ‘How about here, Molly?’ And she said, Just a little farther, honey. I found this place with a stone arch and was really surprised, because I had never seen it before. But I guess Molly knew about it because she took me there. She said, Over there, other side of the arch, honey.
“I’m not sure what happened next. It was strange. I must have just kept walking and walking. Thing is, the strangeness of it didn’t bother me. Like I said, I was still dopey as hell, so strange was the new normal. Somehow I got to a road, and I knew I was only a short way from the house. I knew because I saw the truck where Lieutenant Worf died, and I had passed it on the way to town to find the tools a few hours earlier. There wasn’t a lot of Worf left. I collected everything I could find to be buried.
“Worf isn’t his real name, I know. He told me his name once, but I can’t remember it. See, we had this game. We both liked Star Trek, and he called my son Captain Picard and I called him Lieutenant Worf. My son . . . you remember him, don’t you? I’m sure you do. I can’t say his name. I know it, but I can’t say it. If I do . . . I’ll sink. And I need to hold on till I bury all of you. Anyway, my son tried to say ‘Lieutenant Worf’ but it always came out ‘Woof.’ That made us laugh, then my son laugh. Anne laughed, too. I remember that.”
She took a breath, bit her lip.
“I was tired by then, and night was falling. So I left Molly with Woof—I mean Worf. I covered them with a tarp, secured it with rocks, and I went home with the wheelbarrow. Back there I secured tarps over the bodies in the yard, too. The next day I got up, went upstairs, and went to work. Took me a day and a half to bury Anne. When I finished I stood at the foot of her grave, like I am with you, and I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. Believe me, I have wanted to cry at all your graves, but I can’t.”
She calmed herself, drew a long breath, and stared at the cross.
“I know how much you suffered trying to protect my son. You fought to the last bullet, then you fought with your bare hands. I wish I could tell you what happened to him, but I don’t know. All I can tell you is there’s a hollowness in me that says my son is gone forever. Probably not what you wanted to hear, but that’s the truth of it. You didn’t deserve to die so horribly, none of you deserved what happened to you. I am so sorry for everything. That’s all I wanted to say.”
She tucked the jug under her arm and retied the scarf around her face, leaving just enough of an opening for her eyes to see. She picked up the hammer from the ground and walked away. She loaded her things into the wheelbarrow, grabbed the handles, and lifted it. She looked back at the grave.
“If I don’t come this way again, it’s not because I forgot about you. And if the winds ease I’ll go back to town and bury the rest of them, I promise. But the winds are coming earlier each day now. At first they only came at night. Sometimes there’s this cracking sound. First time I heard it I thought it was thunder. Did I tell you that? Did you ever hear it, lying out here in the night? No, I suppose not. Rest in peace, number twenty-nine.”
She pushed the wheelbarrow up to the road and headed home.
ELEVEN
i
Riiiinng.
Harper pulled the egg timer from his coat, reset it to fifteen.
Tick, tick, tick, tick . . .
“Three down, one to go.”
He dropped it in his pocket and picked up his pace down the one-lane road. He’d lost precious seconds staring at the crosses in the forest where conflicting sensations held him in place. The locals would call the first one relief in seeing the names on the crosses didn’t belong to Katherine Taylor or Max; the second would be guilt in feeling relieved. Emotions, Harper thought, are not the things of our kind. He shook them off.
“Focus.”
He flashed the scene at the graves as he walked to make sure he got it right. The crosses, the scripts reading Molly and Lt Worf. Someone, the same someone he’d been tracking from town, had taken great care in burying the bodies. Someone capable of expressing benevolence and sorrow in equal measure. But who?
A raw wind shook the forest, and he blinked himself to nowtimes. He looked up, saw the tumbling ash-choked sky and the tops of trees bending wildly; then came the sound of thunder.
“Bloody hell.”
He broke into a run till the road cut right and ended at the torched hulks of two GMC trucks in a tree-lined driveway. The trucks looked set in a defensive position to block access to the house but had been quickly overrun. Beyond the trucks, across a yard, was a great slag heap of ash, sodden from the humidity, but the cold wind kept the top of the heap dry and a funnel of ash wound its way up into clouds so thick that the fading light of day could not pass through them. Had to be the house, Harper thought, and there was nothing left of it to clear.
He squeezed by the trucks, hurried up the driveway. Krinkle said there was an outbuilding thirty yards up the drive; it was the last site to be cleared. Coming clear of the trees, Harper saw the battered structure with its broken screen door flapping in the wind. Three more steps and he saw the whole of the backyard. There were rows of graves in the middle of it. Perfectly set, identical to the forest graves.
“Bloody hell.”
His mind tried to sort it.
Inspector Gobet’s mechanics thought time within the warp had stretched to a ratio of four to one since the attack. That would yield a max of eight days within the perimeter while real time outside clocked only two days. Two graves in the forest, plausible; more than two dozen more in the yard?
“No bloody way.”
He flashed his timeline: Krinkle’s bus crashing through the time warp, seeing the roadie behind the wheel. He opens the door for Harper to get off, telling him all bets were off with time in the perim
eter . . . use the egg timer anyway. Harper blinked himself to nowtimes, pulled the timer from his mackintosh. Silence. For a moment he thought the plastic bird was done for. He gave it a shake . . . tick; another shake . . . tick. Seemed crunch time had already begun and seconds were being squashed like swatted flies. The sound of thunder cracked again.
“Swell.”
He dropped the egg timer in his pocket and quick-marched along the graves to check the names. In the last row of three: Unknown Swiss Guard #28, Unknown Swiss Guard #27, Unknown Swiss Guard #26. The next row counted down twenty-five to twenty, then nineteen through fifteen. All the graves exactly the same, all the names on the crosses written by the same caring hand. He got to the first row. Unknown Swiss Guards numbers four through one and one more. He faced the name on the cross.
Anne Jannsen
He staggered under the weight of a new sensation. Back in the forest, seeing that the two graves did not belong to mother and child, he’d told himself they were still alive. He realized it wasn’t a deduction based on fact; it was nothing more than a desire with expectation of attainment, aka hope. He’d seen it a billion times on a billion faces and never understood it. But standing before the graves, Harper felt it.
“This cannot be real.”
The dead soldier in his head chimed in again: It’s real enough, boyo; keep moving.
He turned, jumped up the porch steps. He looked inside the control room while brushing ash from his hair and coat. The place was wrecked with all the signs of a hellish last stand. He saw the door across the room leading to the bunker and marched straight for it. Three steps on he realized he was walking on a path that had been cleared through the wreckage. There were boot prints on the floor, coming and going dozens of times. The prints matched the ones from town; the treads were marked with blood, mud, and ash.
“It’s got to be her. If she’s alive, then maybe Max . . .”
He flew down the stairs to the first tunnel. Krinkle said there were nine false turns and dead ends, that it might take a bit of hit-and-miss to find the way. In fact, the slash marks, bullet scars, and black blood on the walls made it easy. All signs read the goons chased after their prey like famished beasts. And that the last of the Swiss Guards put up one hell of a fight to get mother and child into the bunker. He ran faster, slammed into walls at sharp turns.
“Sod it!”
Around one more corner. Stop. Staring at two dark tunnels: one to the left, one to the right. He dug his cell phone from his coat, tapped the screen, pointed the dim blue light toward the tunnels. Going left was clean. The right tunnel bore slash marks and bullet scars, but no black blood. He moved into the right tunnel and picked up the scent of detergent and bleach. He traced his fingers along the wall; the surface was damp.
“She’s been scrubbing the place clean.”
And as he uttered those words, the tunnel ended.
He was standing at the top of a steep stairwell. A heavy wool blanket had been strung across the bottom of the stairs. Light and fresh air bled over the top of the blanket. Between his phone and the light from the bunker, Harper saw the stairwell had been well scrubbed, too.
He dropped the phone in his coat and walked silently down the steps. He listened for proof of life from within the bunker; nothing. He got to the wool blanket, almost called out her name. Negative. Get in, raise your hand to her eyes and put her under, get the hell out of there.
Harper eased aside the blanket. The primary smash job on the steel door was pure goon. But three heavy lengths of timber had been used since to pry open the door even more and anchor it in place.
He crossed the threshold, stood still.
A camp bed and crib over here; against the wall was a kitchenette with a small table, one adult chair and one child’s high chair; an open door to a bathroom over there. The bathroom would be the only place anyone could hide down here, and he listened for a breath or a heartbeat; nothing. The place was empty.
He looked at the camp bed again. He saw small scratches in the concrete wall, eye level with the pillow. He walked closer and leaned down for a better look. The scratches weren’t random. They were like the graves in the backyard—all perfectly set. Eight groups of five, side by side in two rows of four. Each group was made up of four vertical scratches with a fifth scratch cutting horizontally through them. He saw a string tied to the side of the camp bed. He pulled it and found the six-inch nail tied to the end of it. He stood, touched the sharp steel point, then stared at the scratches on the wall. She’d been marking her time. Two rows of four, eight groups of five.
“Forty bloody days?”
He pulled the egg timer from his coat. It was still. He held it to his ear, shook it. The gears rattled and hummed . . . tick.
“This cannot be good.”
He dropped the timer in his coat pocket and walked slowly around the room, thinking the place had been smashed up but made neat. No slash marks or bullet scars on the walls. The battle ended at the stairwell, he thought. The smashup inside the vault was a result of anger or madness; the cleanup was submission to a brutal fate.
Something gnawed at his guts.
He turned around, scanned the place again. His eyes locked on the table and chairs, the way they faced each other. Look down, boyo. There were skid marks on the floor where the adult’s chair had been moved in and out at the table. The floor under the high chair was spotless. He walked to the shelves, saw the jars of baby food. All evenly stacked as if never touched. He looked at the dish tray next to the sink. There was one dinner plate, a fork and spoon, one glass; all washed and left to dry.
He walked to the bathroom, turned on the light. He saw the empty frame above the sink where a mirror used to be. He saw an adult’s electric toothbrush and a half-used bar of soap on the sink; he saw one towel hanging from the rack. He stepped in, touched it. The cloth was damp. He opened the medicine cabinet behind the ex-mirror. The child’s toothbrush inside had never been used. He walked back into the living space and stood at the crib. He saw the neat bedding and the pajamas with grinning sheep printed on them. The pajamas were folded crisply on the blanket, never worn from the look of them.
Sensation: hope slipping away, aka despair.
Click.
He felt a gun barrel touch the back of his skull.
ii
“Do I have your complete attention?”
It was a woman’s voice, worn but familiar.
“Quite,” Harper said.
He heard boots shuffle back over the concrete floor. He counted seven steps.
“Turn around, slowly.”
“I’m not a threat. I’ll raise my hands to prove it.”
Silence.
“If your hands so much as twitch, I’ll paint the wall with your brains.”
The tone registered don’t-fuck-with-me serious.
“Slow it is, then,” Harper said
He paced his turn to a five count. The woman he expected to see wasn’t there. In her place was a ghostly, ash-laden form with emerald-green eyes. The ghost was pointing a Glock 35 at his head.
“Madame Taylor?”
Without taking her eyes off him or lowering her gun, she used her free hand to loosen the scarf wrapped around her head. Ash fell from her as if shaking off snow. The scarf was black; so was the cloak she wore. And when the scarf dropped to the woman’s shoulders, Harper saw a shock of raggedly cut blond hair.
It was her and not her at the same time.
The facial features matched the image on his timeline. But the once smooth skin was marred with scratches and scrapes. More than anything it was a face barren of expression.
“Well, well. What do we have here?” she said.
“Do you recognize me, Madame Taylor?”
She eased her free hand under her gun hand to support her targeting.
“You’re Jay Harper. You’re a security consultant at the IOC. At least that’s what you said you were when last we met. Lausanne Cathedral, wasn’t it? I was stoned to t
he gills, shot up with potions given to me by little men in white coats. You pretended to care. And you called me ‘Miss’ in those days. Gone all formal on me, have you?”
This time the tone registered bitterness.
Harper focused on the Glock. She held it like a pro. Her grip was firm and her finger was inside the trigger guard. He figured the odds of making a move, came up with 1,000 to 1 chance of getting to her and knocking the gun away before she could fire.
“Go ahead. Make my day,” Katherine said.
“Sorry?”
“The move you’re thinking about. Go for it. I know you guys can move fast. Question is, are you faster than a speeding bullet?”
Harper stared at her, wondering how the hell she got inside his head.
“That’s right, Harper, I know what you are. Anne told me the day before your friends came to town.”
“My friends?”
“Killers, bad shadows, devourers of souls . . . your fucking friends. After all, you’re all the same, aren’t you?”
“No. We’re not the same.”
She tilted her head slowly to the left as if to get a better look at Harper’s face.
“Ah, let’s see, you and Inspector Gobet, you’re the good guys? And the ones who raped me in Lausanne, slaughtered Anne and the others, they’re the bad guys?”
“Yes, that’s how it is.”
She tilted her head to the right, studied Harper’s face from that angle.
“Oh, how the lies drip from your lips. You’re really good at it. Like your ‘I’m no threat’ line. Soon as you said it I remembered you in Lausanne Cathedral. Waving the palm of your hand before my eyes and sending me to dreamland so you could do with me as you wanted. Is that what you guys did to Anne and all the others to make them trust you? You waved the palms of your hands before their eyes, fed them fairy tales in their sleep about good guys and bad guys? Is that what you did to Marc Rochat?”
Harper flashed the lad falling through the sky, saw his body on the ground.
“The lad chose to protect the cathedral, to protect you, of his own free will.”