The Only Child

by Andrew Pyper

  * * *

  Will and Lily make their way back to her room and resume their positions on the bed—she lying propped up at the waist, he seated at the foot—and look at each other for a time as if to confirm they’re both there, both witnesses to what they’ve just experienced, to the confession she’s just made.

  “Are there any more of you?” Will asks finally, breaking the silence. “I mean, does he have any more children?”

  “He’s told me I’m the only one, and I believe him.”

  “What’s he want from you?”

  “To not be alone.”

  Will is about to ask something more when the radio attached to his belt awakens with a burst of static. Buried in the white noise is a voice they both recognize as the man who stood outside the bar in London. His sentences broken by the poor reception.

  . . . situation . . . rumpel . . . jeopardy . . .

  “These walls down here—they’re old-school bombproofed,” Will says, pulling the radio up to his ear. “Sure as hell messes with reception.”

  “What’s ‘rumpel’?”

  “The code we use for the target. Short for Rumpelstiltskin.” Will presses a button at the side of the radio. “Leader One here. Say again, over.”

  Another round of crackling, only one word making its way through.

  “I heard ‘opening,’ ” Lily says.

  “Me too.”

  * * *

  THE HUNTER LILY HAD SEEN outside the London pub watches the man in the cell hurt himself.

  Even though she’s not there, Lily can see it happening. The demon has reached into her mind and is letting her watch. Making her watch.

  The hunched thing stands two feet away, pounding its head into the glass. Its skull and the hard surface meet in a series of cracks that leave a dripping circle of blood.

  The hunter lifts the radio held in his hand.

  “Leader One? We’ve got a situation here,” he says into the mouthpiece. “Rumpel is in jeopardy.”

  He doesn’t go any closer to the door. It’s not hesitation but a kind of enchantment with the sight of the man repeatedly smashing his head. Something impossible to understand that he struggles to figure out like those children’s puzzles where you have to spot the distinctions between two seemingly identical pictures. What’s different about this man and any other man? The hunter decides it’s the look on his face. His eyes meeting the hunter’s even though it isn’t possible for the latter to be seen. The grin that doesn’t falter as its open mouth lets in the freely flowing blood from the widening wound at the top of its forehead.

  He tries the radio again.

  “Leader One? You getting this, over?”

  There may be words of reply in the noise, but the hunter steps toward the door without waiting to hear them, the decision not his anymore, but a command from the thing on the other side.

  Open the door.

  * * *

  WILL IS AT LILY’S DOOR when he stops to look back at her. “You coming?”

  Lily gets off the bed so fast that her head feels like it might float off her neck. She fights it, her hands out at her sides like a tightrope walker’s.

  Will starts down the hall at a run, pulling his gun from its holster. At the corner he looks back to make sure she’s behind him.

  “You have to run!”

  * * *

  AS LILY RUNS, THE MONSTER shows her how the hunter dies.

  He exits the observation room and slips around the corner into the antechamber outside the target’s cell, passing a table on which its cracked leather gloves with blades for fingers and set of metal teeth are laid. Through a small window in the door he can see that the man on the other side is no longer pounding his head against the one-way glass. He’s standing in the center of the room, his clothes covered with thickening red like a human candle, his hair a matted wick atop his head.

  “Don’t move,” the hunter says, entering the code that opens the door. It reminds him to pull the tranq gun out of his back pocket.

  For a moment time slows so that the candle man is there, the hunter lifting the gun as if it’s attached to sacks of sand. And then the candle man is right in front of him. Pulling the gun out of the hunter’s hand and dropping it to the floor.

  Breathe in, the candle man says.

  * * *

  WILL TAKES SO MANY TURNS and is so much faster that Lily imagines a line between them, a jump rope, like the ones she and her classmates held on to on school field trips. So long as she can feel it between them she doesn’t worry about getting lost, only moving her legs.

  He stops to open a door next to the observation room they were in only minutes ago. She stays in the hall as Will enters the anteroom outside the cell. From where she is she can see the gurney, the toilet in the corner. That’s when she realizes she shouldn’t be able to see these things if the cell’s door was closed.

  “We should go,” she says.

  But Will isn’t listening. She follows his line of sight and finds the London pub hunter on the floor, his body holding the cell door open, the arms and legs splayed out as if they had attempted to slow his fall from a great height. Next to it is the hunter’s head. It looks at Lily with a horror similar to her own.

  “He’s not here,” Will is saying to her from miles away. He lays his hands on the sides of her face and makes her look at him.

  “He’s not here,” Will says again. “Which means I have to get you out. Understand?”

  Before Lily can nod there’s a gunshot. A single, useless pop, followed by a man’s scream.

  “Now,” Will says.

  37

  * * *

  Will looks behind him every few yards as they run. His eyes so wild she reads them as meaning the thing is gaining on them, but she never looks back to confirm it.

  While they don’t hear any more gunshots, there’s another scream. Different from the one before. It tells Lily the first shot didn’t bring the thing down. It also tells her the second screaming man didn’t have time to draw his weapon.

  She waits to hear the monster’s howling or laughter over her own strangled breaths, and a moment later she does hear both these things, though she can’t tell if it’s of her own imagining. It may not make a difference anymore. To imagine it is to make it real. To hear it is to let it in.

  Will opens a door midway along a hallway longer than the others. She follows him inside and sees that it’s an office: a metal desk, single filing cabinet, a chair with its stuffing bursting out of holes.

  “Take this,” Will says, swinging around to hand her his gun. She holds it in her palm like a bird with a broken wing. “Stand at the door and make sure nothing’s coming.”

  Lily positions herself a few inches past the doorframe, checks both ways. Thirty feet to the right a fluorescent tube flickers in its death spasm, throwing irregular shadows over the floor.

  Behind her, Will pulls a large envelope and a handheld device out of the drawer. When he turns it on, it emits an awakening beep and a screen illuminates. He studies it before smacking its side.

  Lily spins around. “What’s wrong?”

  “We put a locator chip in him when he was knocked out,” Will says. “This should tell us where he is, but it doesn’t work down here any better than the radios.”

  She checks the hallway again. The light tube is strobing now, so that for a millisecond, she thinks she can see the thing that isn’t Michael in a band of darkness. But with the next blink of light it disappears.

  “What now?” she asks.

  “We get out.”

  “Which way?”

  “Right or left. You choose.”

  Lily gives the gun back to him and starts to the left, away from the fluorescent tube that turns black with a pop.

  “This way,” she says.

  * * *

  LILY FEELS THE MAZE CONSUMING her, pulling her deeper to where the minotaur awaits.

  Hallways and doors with maddening numbers and letters on them, on and o
n. Will hesitates more than once when choosing between the routes to take, which makes her believe he’s only guessing now.

  Every turn they make she’s certain it will be there, grinning at the ease with which they had come to it on their own. It’s why, when Will abruptly stops in front of a door that looks like all the others, she thinks it’s to say it’s over, there’s no way out.

  “Here,” he says, opening the door to a lit passage and starting up the narrow stairs inside.

  Half a dozen steps up and they’re swallowed by darkness again. Lily hears Will pounding upward ahead of her, the distance widening between them. She tells herself to stop feeling for her footing and just trust she won’t fall. The ascent warms the air as they go until it’s stifling. She considers pausing to steady herself but hears movement at the base of the stairs behind her, something sliding over the concrete, and she keeps leaping blindly forward.

  When the light hits her it knocks her back. It hits her—the paleness of the outside, the gray revelation of the stairwell, her own swaying body.

  “We’ve got to go,” Will tells her from the top. He’s holding the GPS device and it’s making sounds now. A pulse of beeps so close together it echoes the panicked drumroll of her heart.

  She uses her arms to start up again. Swinging them at her sides to launch herself into motion.

  “See that car over there?” Will says, pointing at one of the beat-up Mercedes parked forty yards away and slapping a set of keys into her palm. “Get in the driver’s seat.”

  “What about you?”

  He points the gun down the stairwell where the light reaches halfway before yielding to the dark.

  “I’m making sure you have time to start it,” he says.

  Lily heads toward the car but not before detecting the smell of the thing. The spoiled meat of its breath drifting up from the stairs.

  She pulls on the car’s door handle and falls into the seat.

  “I’m in!” she shouts back at Will as she turns the key and the engine rattles and knocks. But he’s not looking her way. He’s frozen by something coming up at him from underground.

  Lily considers running back, shaking him, when she hears the crisp pop of his gun.

  “Will!”

  Her voice reaches him this time. He turns, sees her in the car. Puts one foot in front of the other until he’s sprinting her way.

  “Did you get him?” she asks once he lands in the passenger seat next to her.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “But you saw him?”

  “I heard him.”

  “What did he say?”

  Will almost tells her, but shakes his head free of the words. “Drive,” he says.

  Lily hits the gas. They’re moving, taking the corner around one of the compound’s outbuildings and toward the fence.

  “This is Leader One,” Will shouts into the radio. “Control? Open the gate.”

  She doesn’t slow even though the fence remains in place.

  “Control! Open the gate!”

  Will has leaned forward to look into the mirror on the passenger door. It prompts Lily to do the same in the rearview.

  The thing comes around the corner.

  Still hunched, its strides irregular, but moving incredibly fast, charging toward their car like a hybrid of animal and insect. Gorilla, spider, bull.

  Lily looks forward again and sees the two gates of the interior and exterior fences slowly pulling open. There’s no way it will be wide enough by the time they reach it.

  “Go. Go. Go,” Will is saying.

  Lily angles the car into a head-on approach, aiming straight through the gap. A second before impact, she checks the rearview again. Sees the monster barreling closer, its eyes fixed on hers.

  They make it through the first fence but the second clips the driver’s side, sending the car fishtailing. Will pushes her up straight and she corrects the skid, the Mercedes bucking over the road’s hardened mounds.

  Lily is no longer driving. She holds her foot down hard on the gas and grips the wheel, that’s all.

  Her attention is fixed on the thing that isn’t Michael. Coming through the opened gates, uttering a roar she can hear even over the laboring engine.

  38

  * * *

  They drive in silence except for Will’s directions, a series of turns that takes them through villages so similar Lily is sure they’re going in circles.

  After they’d driven out of the compound’s gates the thing had pursued them for a hundred yards or so before abruptly starting into the forest. For a second it was a bounding interruption through the stillness of the trees, and then it was gone. Will and Lily didn’t look at each other for several miles, both of them checking the windows, making sure it didn’t come storming out at them.

  Now, in one of the villages like all the others, he tells her to pull over in the parking lot outside a convenience store. By the door, a pair of teenaged boys smoke and watch them with the bored attention of a skeptical audience at a magic show.

  “Turn off the engine,” he says, and the Mercedes shudders before it quiets.

  They sit like that for a time, the two of them staring through the windshield at a faded poster for an Iron Maiden concert that happened four years ago.

  “You okay?” Will asks.

  “I’m not sure how to answer that.”

  “Neither am I.”

  She turns to look at him. “Guess your employers aren’t going to be very happy,” she says.

  “No, they won’t be. But it’s all different now.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t work for them anymore. I don’t work for anyone but us.”

  Lily remembers Will’s voice on what she tried to talk herself into being a crank call when she was in New York. I want to protect you. Not “we,” but “I.” This is personal for him, and Lily sees now that it always has been. Tracking Michael, putting an end to him, but also doing for her what he couldn’t do for his sister.

  Will pulls his gaze away from the poster. “I’m going to hunt it,” he says.

  “How?”

  “Over the time we were tracking Michael we learned more about his operations than he guesses. Where he keeps his caches of money, fake passports. He’s out—it’s out—but he’s limited right now. And I’ve got this,” he says, showing the GPS that’s emitting a steady, calm series of beeps. “This is the best opportunity I’m ever going to get to find him.”

  He looks down at his free hand and seems surprised to see that he still holds the gun. Lily waits for him to return it to his holster but he only squeezes it against his thigh, confirming its weight.

  “He’s going to come for me,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “So we should fight it together.”

  “No.”

  “Stop being the good soldier for a second. I’m thinking of maximizing our odds, that’s all.”

  “So am I. And we do that by me moving fast and you getting off the field.”

  He puts the GPS down and fishes from his pocket the envelope he’d taken from the filing cabinet, lays it on her lap.

  “What’s this?”

  “The fail-safe,” he says.

  Lily tears it open and looks inside. Nestled at the bottom are a USB stick and a single key.

  “Once you’re out of here, open up the file that’s been downloaded on that,” he says. “It will give you the location of a safe house and the key will open the door. Inside you’ll find weapons, cash, food.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m not following.”

  Will closes his eyes. “The man who went into the cell, the one it killed—he was someone I’d worked with before. When we started on this we knew it could get sticky, so I prepared a safe house for him and he did the same for me. We didn’t tell each other anything about the location so that if one of us fell into the target’s control—or if we disappointed our employers—
we’d have nothing to tell them. I can’t give them your location if I don’t know where you are. Not knowing also protects you from Michael. It’s like you said. Once you’re connected to him, he can reach inside.”

  “That’s true for me. What connects you to him?”

  “My sister. Now you,” he says. “Who knows? Maybe you care a little about me too. That might be enough.”

  Lily thinks he’s right. Michael could probably find her by tapping into Will, and vice versa.

  She folds the top of the envelope closed. Outside the window over Will’s shoulder the two teenagers light another round of cigarettes and wordlessly set to staring at their car again.

  “You’ve laid out all the ways we can’t know where the other is,” she says. “What about a way to be in the same place again?”

  “There’s a satellite phone at the safe house with one number on it.”

  “Yours.”

  “Yes. But it’s not the one you called me with in London. It’s a phone in a location I know but haven’t got to yet,” he says. “When you get to whatever address is on the memory stick, it’ll be up to you whether you call me or not. I’d understand if you didn’t. But if you do, and if I don’t answer, it’ll be because I’m dead.”

  The idea of their parting makes him suddenly more present to her, his body seated so close in the confines of the car that she’s alert to even the minutest variations of his heartbeat, the temperature of his skin, his faintly cinnamon breath. Her desire for him is only enhanced by the fear that has stretched her thin ever since she sat across the table from Michael at the Kirby what feels like years ago. She wants to touch this man not to make her fear go away but to enflame it, focus it, invest it with an even more desperate urgency. There are things she wants to do to him. And the notion of doing them now, precisely when she shouldn’t want to do them, only sharpens her yearning.

  “Yours,” he says, handing her an American passport. “You’ll need it for the faked visitor visa to Romania. You’re not officially here, remember?”