Redheads

by Jonathan Moore

  Westfield fought to get out, but was hopelessly bound. Steel cuffs bit into his wrists and ankles. The wrist cuffs were attached to something around his waist so he couldn’t move his hands above his stomach. He tried to explore with his fingers, but could barely move his right hand at all. It felt swollen to the point of bursting.

  The girl’s screams went on and on, and between them, Westfield could hear the thing’s low voice. Its words weren’t clear but their intent was obvious. It was taunting her, deliberately driving her into a frenzy of terror.

  Then he felt pressure on his face. The thing’s clawed hand lay across the top of his bag; its voice whispered directly inside his head.

  Listen, it said. Its voice was an awful scratch. You always wondered what it was like for her. What she went through. How long it lasted. Now you’ll know.

  The thing moved away from him then, back to the girl, who redoubled her screams. She screamed until she ran out of breath and then the only sound she could make was a low keening.

  The thing gave a wet chuckle, like a drain coming unclogged.

  And then it roared and tore into her and the girl’s shrieks went so high Westfield could only hear them in his heart. He fought at the cuffs until his wrists were bleeding and he had used all the air in the bag. He was dizzy and his head was pounding in pain, but the girl’s screams would not allow him to stop, and he fought until long after he had lost any sense or conscious thought.

  Then he was in the scorched and ruined landscape of a nightmare. He struggled across this wasteland, where screams came from the darkened sky, and he felt his chest explode with infection. The thing’s mouth was as rotten as its mind. The moon was overhead, lighting his agony with its heatless glow. Dark tendrils of slime mold extruded from the bite marks in his chest and clung to his pale skin like the placenta of some second birth. He thought it would cover him until he was enveloped in its gelatinous cocoon. He tore at it with his hands, but his fingers stuck to the wounds and the slime crawled up his arm, black and burning. He writhed in the bag, half blanketed by the dream. Next to him the thrusting and pummeling never stopped, and neither did the screaming.

  When his fever broke, hours later, he came to a kind of dazed consciousness again. The girl must have died. There was just the sound of the ship’s engine and the movement of the hull through waves. He lay in the body bag, shivering and soaked with his own urine, and waited again. When the bulkhead door opened, he listened to the footsteps and then heard a voice that could only belong to the thing.

  “Get the first-aid kit on the wall.”

  He heard footsteps moving around him and creaking from overhead. Someone set a heavy-sounding metal box on the floor next to him.

  “Open the bag.”

  The thing sounded like it was right above him. Then the zipper over his face came down. After untold hours in the bag, the light of the engine room was overpoweringly bright. He squinted to focus and made out the face of a man. Just a regular man, kneeling over Westfield. He wore a white uniform shirt of the British Merchant Navy, which was stained with water and spots of blood. His brown hair was in disarray, and his eyes were blank with terror. When Westfield’s eyes grew accustomed to the light he looked beyond the man and focused on the catwalk that ran over the engineering space where he lay.

  The thing was there, practically hovering above them by clinging to the underside of the catwalk. Its neck was twisted impossibly around so that its yellow eyes met Westfield’s.

  “Clean the chest wounds,” the thing said. Its voice came snaking out of its leathery lips, which never moved at all. The merchant man went to work as if hypnotized, and Westfield ignored him, staring at the thing.

  You could stuff it in a suit and put it behind a desk, he thought, and it would pass for human.

  In low light, if you couldn’t see its hands.

  But no one would ever mistake it for anything but a monster as it clung to the catwalk, naked, its pale skin pulsing and bulging at its stomach from the meal it had just taken, its taloned fingers and toes easily holding its contorted body in place. He stared into its yellow eyes while the man poured searing alcohol into his wounds and reached into them to clean them with pieces of sterile gauze. There was more here to resist than just the pain and the fear. The man who was tending to him was already destroyed, and Westfield understood this creature had more weapons than just its claws and its teeth. Its eyes searched his and he could feel the way it was pushing into him. The yammering madness of its thoughts now hummed inside his skull. But he gave it nothing more than his own hatred, and when he felt it slipping past that and deeper, he thought of Tara.

  Tara on their wedding night, standing at the foot of the bed and reaching behind her neck to unclasp the hook at the back of her gown. Tara on the street without an umbrella on a rainy day in Tokyo, her wet and red hair standing out in a sea of black umbrellas, the crowd parting around her as she stopped to take a photograph. Tara, whom he would never see or speak to again, whose horrific death had been reenacted for him here on this ship.

  Tara, whom he loved and missed.

  The thing blinked.

  And that was when Westfield felt the man slip two metal objects under his left hand. He briefly met the man’s eyes and used his fingers to slip the objects, whatever they were, into hiding beneath his wrist.

  “That’s enough. Close the bag,” the thing said. Westfield was grateful when the zipper was shut and he was in the dark again, away from the creature and its probing, lantern eyes. He heard the pair of them move off and listened to the bulkhead door slam shut. Then he gently explored the objects with his left hand and discovered a pair of tweezers and a small steel scalpel. The fever came buzzing back then, worse than before, and he knew he couldn’t fight it. He tucked the scalpel and tweezers between the cuff and his left wrist so they would not fall out of his reach and then he lay his head down and closed his eyes to let the wave of sickness take him. The chills turned to a fierce sweating heat, and his tongue swelled with thirst, and eventually, in spite of all his struggles against it, he lost consciousness again.

  He woke in blinding light. He squinted and took deep breaths of the relatively fresh air. The bag was open, zipped down just past his sternum and the tape was gone from his mouth. That could mean only one thing, and he’d been expecting it, but he still felt a quick jolt of fear when he remembered the tweezers and scalpel he’d been slipped. He relaxed when he felt them still against his wrist, held in place by the steel cuff. Either they hadn’t searched him or they knew about the pitiful instruments and wanted him to hold on to some hope. Not that he had any illusions after what he’d seen in the engine room.

  He let his eyes focus on the ceiling—catwalks, conduits, and caged light bulbs that threw more shadow than light—and then tried to look around. He was no longer in the engine room but had been taken to another place inside the ship. It was quieter and cooler here. The fever had passed again but he was weak and dehydrated so at first it was difficult even to raise his head from the floor to peek over the edge of the body bag. He persisted and forced himself to sit all the way up. On the other side of the narrow space, seated at a machinist’s workbench, was a man. This was no merchant seaman. He wore black combat pants and a black T-shirt and was facing away from Westfield, but turned quickly when he heard the noise of Westfield’s body shifting.

  “Welcome back,” he said. He had a cheerful voice and a gentleman’s English accent.

  Westfield just stared at him. The man was clean-cut and would have been handsome but for the half-moon bite mark on his left cheek and the fingernail scratches trailing away from his right eye. Both wounds were puffy and pink, but if they bothered him, he didn’t show it at all.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Captain Westfield. I’ve been hearing all about you from my colleagues.”

  Westfield wasn’t sure he could talk if he wanted to. His mouth was so dry he couldn’t put together the motions to swallow.

  “We just have a few thing
s we need to sort out before we weigh you down and toss you over the side. What do you say?”

  He opened his mouth and breathed out an answer in a rasp that was barely audible over the ceaseless rhythm pulsing from the engine room, “Have at it.”

  The man stood from his stool at the workbench, picked up a leather case the size of a shaving kit, and came to a casual crouch next to Westfield. He put one big hand on Westfield’s chest and pushed him down to the floor. Then he started to talk, his hand still pushing the wind out of Westfield’s lungs.

  “You probably remember Ilya. From Galveston? He and I never saw entirely eye to eye so I don’t hold it against you, whatever you did to him. But he did bring some good things to the table, now and then.”

  He held the leather case and opened it over Westfield. It held five small glass syringes, each needle capped by an orange plastic cover. The lettering on the syringes was in Cyrillic.

  “This for example. Probably the only thing the Russians ever made on their own, aside from vodka, that has a real spark to it. You wouldn’t credit them with being able to come up with something so delicate and so useful. You ever heard of Ivan Rybkin?”

  Westfield just stared at him. The man’s hand was back on his chest, crushing him. Westfield didn’t dare open his mouth for fear that all of his remaining air would be pushed out. The man was clearly waiting for it, ready to pounce and slam down on Westfield’s sternum and leave him gasping. But it was also obvious that this was only a game he was playing until he got to the main event.

  “No? Well, it’s your loss. Great story. Sex, spies and videotape. All that. And it’s where Ilya learned how to use this. Which he then taught me.”

  Now he slammed the palm of his hand into Westfield’s chest and punched the air from him in a single, painful burst. Westfield felt as though his lungs had collapsed and stuck together; no matter how hard he tried to suck air through his dry and swollen throat, it would not come in. He lay writhing in the bag, and as he struggled, the man calmly took one of the syringes from the case, flicked the orange protective cap off with his thumbnail, and jabbed the needle into Westfield’s jugular.

  Westfield fought in agony against his airless lungs and could do nothing to stop the fire spreading from his neck. Inside the bag he made a desperate effort to wriggle the scalpel free from the cuff so that he could slit his own wrists and bleed out in the bag before the man noticed. Anything to end this now. He pulled the scalpel free but it fell from his weak fingers and slipped past his reach. When he finally got a breath of air into his lungs, the drug hit his brain like a depth charge. He saw a flash of blinding of white light and felt himself fall backwards, as though the hull of the ship had opened and dropped him into a whirlpool. The man was still with him, falling alongside him. His eyes locked on Westfield’s, and he grinned.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chris walked out of the Marriott on Post Street and got into a taxi next to the valet stand. Julissa was on the twentieth floor in their adjoining rooms, programming the software for their next step. She’d sent him out with a shopping list written on each side of two small sheets of hotel stationery.

  “Let’s go to Fisherman’s Wharf,” Chris said. The driver nodded and turned on the radio. N.P.R. was covering the Intelligene murders in Foxborough. Their route took them over Nob Hill, then over Russian Hill and down towards the north end of the city. It was raining and the streets were slick but the driver never slowed. They passed a row house Chris and Cheryl had considered buying when they were thinking of staying in California. On the radio, the news host went through all the details that Chris already knew: the dismemberment of the entire staff of scientists and interns, the pyramid of body parts found in the center of the fire, the fact that Chevalier had been found in his home, ripped in half. There were no known motives. The company was profitable, its books clean. Chevalier had been admired and liked, even by the people he’d left behind at Harvard when he started his company. There were none of the usual academic jealousies or accusations of intellectual theft. Chevalier had been a genius in his own right, had been generous with his ideas. The mystery was wide open and the police had no leads. The story moved to the economy and Chris looked out the window and thought about other things.

  When they arrived in San Francisco, Julissa had asked him to stand in a separate line going through immigration. She didn’t want him nearby if she got arrested for traveling on a stolen passport. He’d been one line over and had watched the ICE officer clear her into the country. It had taken about a minute, the officer looking at Julissa’s face and then typing into his computer. There were cameras all around, at least a dozen just that he could see, half of them backed by UV illuminators that Julissa said would help the biometric algorithm make faster identifications. Surely they were both in the State Department’s database, their real names matched irrevocably to their faces. But they both passed through immigration without incident, walked quickly past the customs check and then out of the secure area of the airport. They had taken the first taxi they found, not wanting to spend the time to rent a car, not wanting to spend another minute in an airport crawling with law enforcement and enmeshed with wires and lenses and microphones.

  So now, Chris was on his way to rent a car. He paid the taxi driver and stepped out on the sidewalk next to Fisherman’s Wharf. There was a Hard Rock Cafe and a Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, both closed this early in the morning. Seagulls stood on the roofs, each balanced on one leg, oblivious to the cool morning rain. Chris could smell sourdough bread in the ovens of a bakery, and then there was the smell of the bay itself, like the water inside a freshly shucked oyster. He walked over to the rail and looked at the sailboats tied up at their docks. The owner of a fifty-foot ketch had left his dinghy in the water, and a young female sea lion had climbed inside to sleep on the floorboards. He had built his entire life around this one task, and had dedicated himself to it daily with a focus that had frightened Mike. But he was not so single minded that he could not dream of a gentler future when the thing was dead. He thought of Julissa diving off the side of a sailboat and into the turquoise water of a lagoon in the Tuamotus, as gracefully as she had plunged into the harbor at Haleolono. He thought of the way she had turned to him, treading water with her hands lightly cupped on her breasts. Chris turned his collar up against the rain, checked his pocket for Julissa’s shopping list, and then headed across The Embarcadero and up Beach Street to the Avis storefront.

  After he got his car, he sat in the driver’s seat on the third floor of the parking garage with his computer open on his lap, using Google to track down the things he needed to buy for Julissa. He’d been afraid that for some of the stranger electronics parts, he’d have to drive all the way to Silicon Valley at the south end of the bay, but he found a store on University Avenue in Berkeley that sounded promising. Berkeley was just across the Bay Bridge; he could be there in half an hour if traffic wasn’t bad. He used his satellite phone to call the store, and when he had a clerk on the line, he read down Julissa’s list and confirmed everything was in stock. She’d been up late in the night drawing circuits and doing calculations on her computer. He didn’t entirely understand what she was building, but he knew it would help them find the hacker’s computer.

  They didn’t have much of a plan after that. Chris drove out of the parking garage and followed Beach Street to The Embarcadero. Assuming they could get the guy without killing him, they would need a quiet place to do the interrogation. There were isolated areas along the coast just south of the city on Highway 1. They could drive him down there, leave the car at a scenic lookout, and force him down into a gully near the ocean. It would be nighttime and there would be no pedestrians on the highway, and even if there were, the sound of the waves and wind would keep his shouts from reaching the road.

  He assumed they would have to hurt him to make him tell them anything, and he thought about that for a while. Here, in cold blood, driving down The Embarcadero in the rain in a rented Chevrol
et, he could picture hurting this man. Cutting him with a knife or smashing his fingers to pulp with rocks. What if the hacker turned out to be a woman? That was a complication he hadn’t thought of, and it changed the emotional calculus. If they were to be successful, they’d have to deal with any number of things they’d never planned for.

  And then he considered the fact that the whole idea was dependent upon the shaky assumption that the person would either talk willingly or that coercion would make him tell the truth. Chris thought it was fairly common knowledge that a person will say anything to make torture stop. Even if their plan worked, Chris was still concerned about what to do with their man after they’d gotten what they wanted out of him. Killing him would be the most logical thing to do. Any information he gave them would be worthless if he ran off and sounded a warning before they could act on it. What of the tricky question of how tight a leash the thing kept on its pet computer hacker? Did he have to check in every day? Maybe the best thing would be to incapacitate him and then clone his hard drives, search them at their leisure, and never interrogate him at all; surely a hacker would store most of his useful information on a computer drive, and Julissa would find a way to read it.

  He thought about these things as he circled up and onto the bridge, crossing the suspension span to Yerba Buena Island and then the second stretch across to Oakland. He had a sense it would be a day of troubling thoughts without real answers. It happened often enough he’d learned to roll with it. But he wished he hadn’t left Julissa alone. He would finish this as fast as he could and get back to her.

  In Berkeley, he found parking and walked along University Avenue until he came to the store, which was a dimly lit warehouse of steel shelves and dusty cardboard boxes. He handed Julissa’s list to the college student working as a clerk. He wore a black apron over his street clothes and the nametag on his shirt pocket read David.