Project Antichrist

by Pavel Kravchenko

  I had begun to run before I realized it. I hurdled a low railing and tore into an alley.

  “Freeze!” a voice cried. “Stop or you’re dead!”

  That got my attention. I froze and turned, lifting my left hand to shield my eyes from the high beams of the police car.

  “He’s got a gun!” the same voice cried. And then he shot me. Or would have shot me, if he hadn’t been so excited. There was a thunderclap and a CHUH of an impact, which I thought at first was coming from inside my skull. But the bullet actually zipped by my ear, tearing a chunk out of the brick wall and ricocheting away.

  “Freeze!” another voice cried, and I think it must have momentarily frozen the first cop, because he did not shoot again for another second or so. Which was long enough for me. I ran for the second time, and that time I ran like hell. The new, shiny, apparently gun-looking phone still in my right fist, I burst across the alley, doubled back and crossed it again in the opposite direction, ducking into a narrower alley that joined the first one at a ninety-degree angle and putting the building corner between me and the lights. I was wind. I created wind. It was a sixty or seventy-yard dash to the next intersection, and I didn’t as much cover the distance in so many steps, as swallowed the space in two gulps. I assumed the cops had given chase, but all I heard was the wind, all I saw were street crossings, city blocks falling away behind me. I ran, I turned, ran, turned, until I could no longer breathe. I hugged a wet tree and stood there hawking and maybe crying a little, when my quivering, treehugging shadow was thrown against the nearest wall once again by the headlights of a car. All that running for nothing, I thought. No chance at all. There was nothing I could do. I didn’t have enough left in the lungs to yell “Don’t shoot!” I could no longer run. I couldn’t even tense up in the anticipation of being shot. I just stood there, hugging the tree, waiting.

  “Luke, get in the car!”

  “What?” I gasped. It was Iris. I couldn’t see her behind the lights, but it was her voice. I let go of the tree. “Iris?”

  “Get in the back! Let’s go!”

  I cleared the beams and finally saw the old beat up Civic. Iris gesticulated from behind the wheel. Lloyd was in the front next to her, not talking or looking at me. I pulled at the handle and fell into the back seat. The car jerked into motion.

  * * *

  We had driven for a minute or so, before I sat up and asked, “How?”

  It seemed like a bad time, though. A pair of police cars flew left to right through an intersection a hundred feet in front of us, Iris hit the breaks and Lloyd shouted “There!” and pointed somewhere to the left with his gun. With his gun!

  The sharp turn threw me sideways.

  “Goddamn I’m an idiot,” said Lloyd. “They’ll notice. We should have just kept going across. Maybe they’re too busy.”

  “What do we do?” Iris asked.

  “They’ll be looking for a car now. I think we need to park somewhere and stay low. They don’t know what car it was, and there’s a million parked cars on this block alone.”

  “So we sit in the car?”

  “Yeah, just be on the lookout, get low if you see a cop car passing by.”

  “What if they have someone on foot just walking and peeking inside parked cars?”

  “Then… we… go to plan B.”

  “You have a gun,” I bleated. “Why do you have a gun?”

  “Wait,” Iris said. “Look, this is Greenwood. We’re like three blocks away from my place. We can make it there.”

  I looked out through the back window. About three blocks back, which may have been the street from which Iris swerved into that alley, a cop car passed slowly. When it almost disappeared from view, it stopped, reversed, and turned into the same alley. I turned and saw Iris’s eyes in the rear view mirror. Lloyd twisted in his seat.

  “We can make it there,” Iris repeated, making a hard left and a right at the next crossing. Sixty seconds later, she pulled into a small fenced courtyard, cut the lights and the engine. We listened for sirens. They seemed to be going off all over the place, but none were close for the moment.

  “Let’s go.”

  Iris led us through a doorway into the building and up the stairs to the second floor. There was just one door on the landing. It opened into a tiny foyer, which was the sharp point of a “V” created by two corridors. Of these, we took the one on the right and followed it until it turned left again. Iris’s place was full of doors, turns and muffled voices. It was dark, the only illumination coming from rare, painted-over light bulbs. Behind one of the doors we passed a rock band seemed to be rehearsing. Lloyd constantly glanced over his shoulder. At some point he had put the gun away.

  We came to the sharp point of a V on the other side of the building. Iris unlocked a door, leading us into a small, two-room apartment. The living room had a kitchen, a couch and piles of books.

  “Don’t turn the light on,” said Lloyd. He went to the window and peeked around the side of the blinds. Iris nodded and went to the next room.

  “This place is crowded,” said Lloyd.

  “No one keeps track who comes and who goes,” she replied, unseen. There was a sound of running water.

  While they made small talk, I stood glued to the door. The slowing of the pace was causing everything to catch up with me all at once. A cop nearly shot me. Iris came back with a car. Lloyd had a gun. I almost got killed. Just like that. For buying and carrying a new silver-colored phone. And Lloyd had a silver-colored gun. My eyes found his silhouette in the dark, but he began to talk before I could get the words out of my open mouth.

  “I followed you,” he said. “What you do is your business, but I was hired to do a job and I was going to do it. Or at least try to do it for as long as possible. So I was around the corner when the cops showed up. Thought you were dead when he shot you, but then you blew right by me like your ass was on fire. So I popped a few rounds in their direction before going after you, but I guess I misjudged how fast both of us could run. I saw your shadow disappearing behind a corner, and it didn’t look good for me keeping up. Still, I ran after you while the cops were wasting their time shooting the place up, but after about a block I saw no sign of you. That’s when a car caught up to me.”

  Iris’s form appeared in the doorway.

  “You see I live real close by where we were. We had a car — everyone in the building uses it if they need to — so I figured I’d give you a ride. You weren’t where I left you, but then I saw the police cars and followed them. Then I almost ran over Lloyd, and then I almost ran him over again, when I saw that he had a gun.” Which brought me back to my open mouth. I made a sound.

  “I’m a bodyguard,” Lloyd said. “I have a gun, all right? Move on.”

  “You shot at the cops?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “I didn’t hear the shots.”

  “You ran fast. And I guess the gun is pretty quiet, for a gun. Anyway, why would I lie about shooting at cops?”

  “I don’t know. Why would you tell the truth about shooting at cops?”

  “Why don’t you have a seat?” he said. “You sound like you’re about to lose it.”

  The room flashed red and blue, as a police car rolled by right under the building, past the entrance to the courtyard and the parked Civic. I sat down on the couch. Iris opened the fridge and brought us bottles of water. Lloyd put his bottle on the floor and pulled out a metal flask from his jacket. He also pulled out a small orange bottle of pills.

  “Relax,” he said, dropping the last two capsules on his palm and catapulting them into his mouth. “These are just for my PTSD.”

  He proceeded to chase the pills from the flask, then offered the flask to me.

  “Want some? The pills are shit. Don’t work without vodka.”

  I did begin to want some just then. It burned, but it helped a little. I even asked Lloyd how he got PTSD. He scowled.

  “Where’d you get your depression from?”

&n
bsp; “Sorry. Wait, does everyone really know about that?”

  “If someone wants to take a shower,” Iris said, “the towels are in the little closet.”

  Both, Iris and Lloyd looked at me when she said that, which I found rather curious. Then I remembered that I haven’t showered since I threw out my pills three days earlier. And I also couldn’t help recalling some of the things that happened during those three days.

  “Guess I’ll go first,” I said.

  When I came out half an hour later, the light was on in the living room. Lloyd was chewing on a sandwich. Its brother was on a small table set in front of the couch. Being my breakfast, the ham sandwich tasted about as good as Chef Brunot’s Lobster Thermidor. Things were looking up again.

  “I used your new phone to call a friend of mine,” said Lloyd with his mouth full. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “After I was done with the call, I broke your new phone into little pieces.”

  “Why?”

  “The passive approach almost got me killed, so I decided to take initiative. I couldn’t talk you into it, so now I’m trying to force you to trust me and not run off looking for another bullet, at least until we meet this friend of mine.”

  “You know, it occurred to me in the shower, that the cop only shot me because he thought my phone was a gun.”

  He almost choked on his food, began to raise his voice, but then took a deep breath instead. He almost smiled at me.

  “I don’t want to argue about it. Can you do me a favor? Give me twelve hours? Or am I supposed to stay awake all night making sure you don’t decide to go out and get shot?”

  “Is this the friend who knows things?”

  “It’s not the friend, but he probably knows a good deal more than I, and can tell it a whole lot better.”

  “Can’t we go now? We have a car, and things seem to have calmed down out there.”

  “No, they didn’t. My friend thinks we shouldn’t move until about five or six o’clock in the morning.”

  “Is Iris just going to let us stay here?”

  “She’s your friend, why don’t you ask her?”

  “You’re the one who wants us to stay.”

  “It’s fine!” Iris shouted from the next room. “That couch unfolds into a bed.”

  Lloyd beamed. “Ready when you are.”

  I stood up and walked over and knocked on Iris’s doorway.

  “Yeah, come in.”

  Inside was a smallish bed, a computer desk, an easel and some paintings. Iris closed her laptop.

  “Nice place,” I said.

  “What’s up, Luke?”

  “I think it’s a little creepy how you let two strange men, armed and on the run from police, stay the night at your place.”

  “Didn’t seem like such a big deal, considering I already helped you escape the cops.”

  “Yeah, why did you do that?”

  “I did it, because you needed help, and I was in a position to provide it.”

  “So what, you help everybody?”

  “No, it’s impossible to help everybody. But if I’m there, and someone needs help, and I believe they deserve it, sure, I’ll try. Is that so strange?”

  “It is, when by helping them you’re putting yourself in serious danger.”

  “I try not to let fear get in the way of doing the right thing.”

  “But how do you know it’s the right thing?”

  “How does anybody know? Either they tell themselves it’s the right thing, or they let someone else tell them what the right thing is. I prefer my own judgment. But maybe I’m wrong. After all, you’re a TV star! Maybe my judgment has been impaired by your charisma. If I believe that, I’ll stop helping. For now, I believe you. Also, the pills you stopped taking are a matter of personal interest to me. And you seem like a great research subject.”

  When I returned some time later to the living room, Lloyd was lying on his side on the sofa bed. It was quiet. With a sigh, I turned off the light and stretched out next to him.

  Chapter Eight

  Two men in gray suits stood facing each other in the middle of a spacious oval office. The one speaking in a raised voice was tall and slender, middle-aged, dark-haired and sharp-nosed. The other was of about the same height, wider in the shoulders, thicker in the chest, and with his gray sideburns could be taken for an older relative of the first man. Beyond the single large window lay, completely silenced, a busy New York avenue.

  “So, if I understand this correctly, by ‘fool-proof’ you meant success was guaranteed, unless something completely unrealistic happened, something utterly out of the question, something preposterous, like when the subject you prepped for over five years STOPS TAKING PILLS?” the younger-looking man was saying, lapsing into a reverberating shout. He shouted without opening his mouth any wider than during regular speech.

  The target of his wrath, accustomed to the present style of discussion, held his own. Having confirmed his interlocutor finished the sentence, he began to say, “The probability of such an event happening unaided is—”

  “The probability?! Let me tell you something. As of right now, the probability of such an event is one hundred percent, you understand? Two marshals are one hundred percent dead; Whales is one hundred percent free; and we are one hundred percent screwed.”

  “I agree, sir. But as I was about to point out—”

  “This is the second time your TV star wiggles out of police’s grasp. Make sure there isn’t a third. You understand? Make sure.”

  “There’s more to it,” the older man said firmly. His cheeks contracted briefly over a clenched jaw. His boss eyed his facial movements with displeasure, but he too, had known the man for a long time. Leaning with one hand on the desk, he listened. “As I said, it is very unlikely that Mr. Whales was and still is operating unaided.”

  “Who could possibly be helping him?”

  “I think you know the answer to that question.”

  The younger man did, of course. There was only one answer to the question. Now he felt foolish for voicing it, and angry at the older man for pointing out his error. It was unlike both of them. The ordeal was taking its toll. He kept his voice calm.

  “But how?”

  “We have a rat.”

  The men fell silent. After some time, the younger one spoke.

  “If a rat is soiling our stock, send the hounds.”

  “On the other hand, it may be better to let the local authorities resolve the situation. We are not entirely certain—”

  “No. Send them. Better safe than sorry. You do have a back-up for the project, is that not correct?”

  “It is, sir. But there’s a reason why he is a back-up…”

  “Send them. Explain as much as you can. Let it be done quickly. In two months, when no one remembers Whales, we will proceed with the other one. Honestly, all we need is a nudge. He will do.”

  “What about the FBI?”

  “Who do they have on the case?”

  “Brighton and Brome, sir.”

  The younger man, who was becoming calmer, now that his orders were being obeyed, glared.

  “You know well enough their names mean nothing to me. Give me the numbers. No decimals.”

  “Three and Five.”

  “A Five? Hmm. Well, we can risk one. We must risk one.” Then, after a brief pause, he added suddenly, “Which one is a Five?”

  His assistant’s eyebrows climbed slightly and he almost smiled.

  “Brighton, sir,” he said. The younger man nodded.

  “That will be all.”

  The old man turned to leave, hesitated. “Are you sure they will forget in two months? We’re really being hurried along this time.”

  “They will forget.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A gray door slid in and back out of the wall. The Chief Administrator was left

  alone.

  * * *

  Special Agent Brome,
a modest Three on the Human Agent Loyalty, Achievement and Potential (HALAP) scale, dressed in stiff black suit and warm wool slippers, was eating sugar-free corn flakes at the pallid kitchen table. He neither had any knowledge of being a Three, nor had he ever heard of HALAP. What occupied his mind that morning were the consequences of a divorce.

  “Daddy, will you catch a bad guy today?” Annie asked, milk dripping down her chin. Just like him, she was an early riser.

  Absently, daddy dabbed her chin with a cloth napkin. He wished he knew.

  Grace, who was not an early riser, but woke up every morning to see him off, yawned in a cute way, smacking her lips. Flames of the morning sun slithered through azure drapes and got tangled in her hair. He went to put the bowl in the sink and kiss her.

  “Why do you have to catch bad guys on Sundays?” Grace asked. “Why do I have to wake up?”

  “At least you got that extra hour of sleep today.”

  “Be careful,” she said. “Love you.”

  “Love you, daddy,” Annie rang out, smooching his cheek and hugging his head.

  “Love you, girls.”

  Brome put on his shoes and went out the door.

  He pulled out of the driveway, waved and hit the gas. The thoughts kept up no matter how fast he drove. He took the ramp to I-55 and hit the breaks. Stupid traffic. He remembered seeing, back a few years, a demo on TV, with the double-tiered freeways all over the place. But somehow the city ran out of money after completing just the northwestern part of the road, and the second level over Stephenson never got built. Thanks to that, Brome now had to suffer through the unending ten-foot spasms of a Chicago traffic jam, alone with his thoughts. He had no idea how people managed without pills. He felt like he was about to lose it, especially since the annoying, persistent voice in his head kept reminding him that his divorce thoughts only started when he stopped taking his medicine.