The Intruders

  There was a scream, something that had words hidden in it. Gary pulled the flashlight around, fast.

  Someone staggered into view. A young girl, standing in the flashlight’s beam like something transfixed in the night on a backcountry road. Her hair was whipped in all directions, as if she’d been trying to pull it out. She was wearing a coat that was covered in blood and something dark and viscous. Her face was wet with tears, smeared with dirt, the tendons in her neck pulled taut to the snapping point.

  “Go away!” she screamed.

  As Fisher moved toward her, the girl started hammering at her head and face with her fists. “You’re not allowed in here!”

  Fisher held out his hands to her. “Shh,” he said. “It’s okay. It’s—”

  The girl’s head jerked up. She stared at Fisher as if he’d appeared out of thin air. She blinked. Her voice changed, rasping deeper.

  “Who…” she snarled, “…the fuck are you?”

  “It’s okay,” Gary said, taking another step closer. “Everything’s okay. We’re—”

  But then there was a clunking sound, and lights started to come on from the far end of the space, flicking toward us out of the darkness, coming on in groups.

  I began to see that we were in a big, big space—about fifty yards long and forty yards wide. It was difficult to be exact, because the low ceiling was supported by brick columns that obscured the view. There was a central area of floor. In this was a circular wooden table. There were nine chairs around it, heavy, oak. A glass pitcher in front of each of them, opaque with dust. It looked like something mothballed since the Victorian era, or transported from a medieval hall, or discovered in a bunker on another planet.

  Rows of wooden seats ran down both sides of the room, behind a flat front, like pews, each banked higher than the one in front. The light was coming from small, dusty electric lamps set along the rows, making it look like a Catholic church on a long-ago winter afternoon when no one had done much remembrance.

  Fisher was openmouthed, taking it in. The girl was staring past him, back the way we’d come.

  I turned to see that someone had entered the room. A tall figure, dressed in a coat. I knew immediately where I’d seen him before. In Byron’s. It was the man who had killed Bill Anderson.

  He walked slowly down the center of the room, not giving the table and chairs or any of the rest of it a second glance. He wasn’t looking at Gary or me either.

  He was here for only one thing.

  “Hello, Marcus,” he said as he slapped a clip into the gun he held in his right hand. “At least this time you’ll know it’s me, right?”

  The girl turned and ran, heading straight for a door at the other end of the room.

  “Time to die!” the man shouted after her. “Again!”

  Gary ran after the girl.

  I turned back to the man in the coat. “Who the hell are you?”

  He raised the gun and shot me, in passing, and then kept on walking as if I were already dead.

  chapter

  FORTY-ONE

  Madison sprinted through the door, back into the dark, and went careering along a series of twists and bends into black corridors. She was the fox now, cunning and at home. She hardly even knew who she was anymore, in fact was barely sensible to her body’s crashes into walls, the stumbles and falls. As her body ran, she ran, too, inside, through a head that was no longer hers and no longer a haven, no longer even safe.

  There were running footsteps behind her for a few minutes, and a flicking light, but for the moment she had lost her pursuers, dodging down a maze of corridors that Marcus knew but Shepherd and the other man did not: Shepherd, the man who’d come to her on the beach and smashed a hole in her mind wide enough for Marcus to start coming through. Shepherd evidently wanted to kill her now, and it sounded like maybe he’d done so before.

  She’d been right not to trust him, huh.

  She tripped over something, hard, and fell sprawling.

  As she picked herself up, she suddenly realized she was in a place she’d been in already. She recognized it from the smell.

  Which meant that the door, a way out back up into the building, was on the other side of this room.

  She was exhausted from days of walking. She was exhausted just from being alive. She kept moving because she was terrified, but the man inside was not. He was not afraid of darkness or dead girls or anything else, had never understood the emotion properly. Never in all his lives. He’d seen too much. He’d known this place before it was even here, after all, known it when it was trees and rock and water. It was his. Everything was his to do with as he wished. Or so he believed.

  Not everything, Madison decided.

  As she stumbled through the chaos of the room, she tearfully pulled off her coat. She didn’t want it anymore. Not with so much blood in it. She didn’t want it because it hadn’t been she who’d known how to make her mother buy it for her. She wanted her mother now, and her father, but she did not want this coat. If she was ever going to see them again, it could only be as herself.

  She threw the coat on the floor, but her legs stopped moving immediately, knees locking.

  Of course. He wanted his notebook, which was still in the coat pocket. He didn’t want it left here. He needed it. Madison was glad to make him angry, and suddenly she had an even better idea.

  She pulled the cigarette lighter out of her pocket. She knelt and held it to the coat, right where the dumb notebook was, with all its stupid words and sums and things she did not want to remember or understand. She flicked the wheel more awkwardly than when he did it, because he had smoked and she did not.

  But she kept at it. He tried to pull her arm away, but she held firm, straining every muscle against his will, until she got a flame and the coat was on fire. Everything around it was dry. She moved the flame to a pile of dry and musty books.

  The fire spread quickly. She started to laugh and scream, feeling her head split open, and then she was completely in the cloud.

  It feels like someone hitting you with a sledgehammer, to which they’ve stuck a thumbtack, point out.

  The bullet hit me high in the left shoulder, spinning me to crash into the first bank of seating. For a moment my vision went black, the impact to the back of my head hurting more for a moment than the shell wound.

  I hit the ground hard and rolled, tried to push up with my left hand, felt something like cracking glass shoot along my arm. I reached up and grabbed the top of the wooden frontage with my right hand, hauled myself up.

  Blood was running out of my jacket. My whole arm felt hot. The pain in my head already felt like nothing at all, and I knew that my shoulder was going start feeling worse real fast.

  I ran into the corridor at the end of the room. A sharp, right-angle turn took me into darkness. I could hear the echoes of Gary shouting from somewhere up ahead, however, and I chased the sound.

  When I made another right, I heard the sound of my footsteps change, flat and quiet, and knew I must be in a chamber of similar size to the one I’d just left. I pulled out my cell phone and flipped it open, the screen shedding a weak light as I stumbled forward.

  This room had no seats, was more like a storage vault or an antechamber for the other room. I ran straight through it toward the other end.

  On the other side was a door to another short corridor, with two possible exits on either side. I realized I must now be close to the series of tunnels that had delivered us to the large chamber in the first place.

  A high-pitched laugh/scream echoed down one of the corridors toward me. The girl. Then a shout that didn’t sound like Gary. It had to be the man who’d shot me. I wanted to see him again, and soon.

  I held the phone up toward both of the openings in turn and saw a smear of something dark that could’ve been blood on one wall. I took the corridor next to it. It felt like this was angling upward again. As I ran up it I could smell something new. Not the body smell from before, though that was present.
Something acrid and dry.

  I started to heard different noises ahead, too, and thought I must be gaining on either Gary or the other man, even though they didn’t sound like voices or footsteps.

  It was getting warmer.

  Then I knew what the smell was. It was smoke. Something was on fire. The noise I’d heard was crackling and the sound of burning wood. I stopped running. I didn’t want to head into a dead end full of fire. I wasn’t sure I could find my way back the other way, however, and I didn’t want to get stuck the wrong side. Whatever I wanted to do, the longer I took, the harder it would get. So I started onward again.

  Soon the light from the phone was reflecting back at me, bounced against billowing smoke, showing me nothing, so I stuffed it into my pocket. I pulled my coat off, crying out as it snagged the wound, then held it up over my mouth. I could breathe less painfully, but it didn’t help my eyes, and as I kept pushing forward, I was half blinded, keeping my back to the wall and sliding sideways along it, knowing I had to keep going however much my body wanted to run in the other direction.

  Then it was suddenly hotter and louder, and I lurched into a room I’d seen before, the one with the body bags. This time I’d come into it from the far end, near the body in the chair. It was still there, the plastic flicker lit by flames that filled the center of the room.

  I headed away from it toward the right-hand wall, now a blaze of burning books, pulling myself over furniture, shoving crates aside in an attempt to put something solid between me and the flames.

  I stepped on at least one of the bags on the floor, breaking something inside. At the other end of the room, I saw a shape silhouetted in the doorway.

  I shouted Gary’s name. He didn’t hear me, or if he did, he just kept on running anyway.

  In her head, Madison was now sprinting along a tide line, as if she and her mother and father had gone for a walk on Cannon Beach at the end of a long afternoon, and her parents were chatting happily, and the weather was fine, and so she’d gone running ahead, feet pounding over the sand, running along the edge of the world. She would run to the end and then turn around, come back to her parents with open arms, and her father would bend down to catch her, the way he always had, even though she was too big for that now and they both knew it, though they pretended they did not.

  But somehow she was also running beside a different body of water, and in a different time. She was running along Elliott Bay, here in Seattle, ten years ago and in the dead of night, fleeing in the knowledge that someone was coming after him/her and that whoever it was wanted her/him very dead. That they discovered what lay buried beneath the basement of his house in the Queen Anne District, and the others hidden under the building here in Belltown, and decided that his behavior could not be tolerated anymore. They had come for him just ahead of the police, and he’d managed to get out of the house, but he knew they were serious, and his advantage would not last long. Marcus had always suspected that Rose had been behind the decision, Joe Cranfield’s little protégée stretching her wings. Now he knew that it had been Shepherd who’d been there to do the Nine’s killing work, barely a month after he’d agreed to the bargain struck in a hotel bar here in Seattle—a bargain Marcus had designed, because he’d known, with the experience of many lifetimes, that the shadows at the end of this life were drawing in.

  They had chased, and he had run, toward a trap with Shepherd standing at the end.

  In a way Marcus respected this. Shepherd was the obvious choice, and who could blame him for working both sides? But had they known that Marcus was still alive when they’d sealed him in the bag and left him to scream himself to death in the pitch-black of that cellar room?

  Yes, he believed they had.

  That was not nice. That was not the way they were supposed to leave. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve died. It’s never something you look forward to. And as Marcus watched the child try to deal with the situation she was in, he began to feel darkness gathering once more. Shadows he was not prepared to confront again so soon.

  Though her head was full of movement, in reality Madison was going nowhere. She was crawling on hands and knees along a corridor, dragging herself through dust and ash, unable to see anything. Her lungs were so full of smoke it felt like someone had shoveled earth into them. She’d burned her hand and arm in the room where she’d set the fire, caught by surprise at how quickly it had taken, and the pain was intense. She did not know in which direction to go, and she’d had enough. Of everything.

  She was not going to survive this. She knew that. So she was trying now to find the way to another place, one deep inside, pushing the man away, knowing how much he wanted to be back but feeling his grip falter as he realized she’d rather be dead than live like this, that this girl was not prepared to be his home.

  Then she banged into something. She raised her head, sensing that it was a fraction lighter here. There was cooler air coming from somewhere, too.

  In a flash of clarity she was aware that she was no longer in a corridor, but in more open space—and that what she’d run into was the foot of a staircase.

  She hauled herself onto the bottom step and started pulling herself up the wooden stairs. All she had to do was get up them and then run, really run this time. There was a door to the street up there, and past it was the outside world. She could get out through it and then keep running.

  Straight into the busy road, without looking left or right. It would be a sad solution, but it was workable. And it would teach Marcus a lesson. Be careful which little girl’s body you try to steal.

  Not all of them will stand for it.

  The right side of the room was a wall of fire now. I kept heading down the middle, plowing through the debris, smelling my hair and coat as they began to burn. A stretch of the bookcase fell away from the wall, toppling in slow motion and showering me with burning paper and wood and sparks. I ducked my head and just kept going through it, shouldering forward until I got to the doorway, flapping at the parts of me that were on fire.

  The corridor was choked with smoke, but I could hear retching sounds ahead. I stumbled straight through the thick, gray clouds, covering my whole face with my jacket now. The muscles in my shoulder had begun spasming, and I could feel how wet it was, and my arm had started going numb. I hit it with my fist to keep the blood flowing and to send a jag of pain up into my head.

  As I made it into the room at the bottom of the staircase, I nearly fell over someone crouched on the ground, rolled into a ball, coughing his guts up.

  It was Gary. I grabbed his jacket collar and pulled him along with me, hauling him to the foot of the stairs, screaming down at his face. He finally started moving under his own steam, and we fell up them together. I could barely see his back through my stinging, watering eyes. At the bend in the stairs, I slipped and crashed to my knees. Fisher turned and wrenched his arm under mine, pulling me around and back to my feet.

  We stumbled up the last stretch side by side.

  This hallway, too, was clogged with smoke. Gary ran straight down it toward the door to the street, which was hanging wide. I stepped over Todd Crane’s body but knew I couldn’t just leave it there and bent to grab his wrist. He made a sound as I pulled him down the hall toward the door, and I realized he was still alive. I felt a muscle in my back tear but kept dragging him until I fell over the doorstep and out into the cold night air.

  It was like being reborn.

  Cars, night sounds, glints of light. People were backing and running away from the building, shouting, pointing. Smoke was billowing out onto the street. I heard a siren in the distance, heading in this direction.

  I staggered a short distance from the doorway, leaving Crane slumped over the step. Gary was shouting somewhere in the melee, though at first I couldn’t see where he was. Everyone seemed to have a much clearer idea of what was going on than I did, to be moving faster and with greater intent, and what took place next happened so quickly that it’s only in recolle
ction that I was even really there.

  The man with the gun was advancing toward the little girl, who was caught in the middle of the sidewalk. A gap opened up around her as people ran to get out of the way.

  Gary was not running, however.

  He had the girl’s arm gripped in his hand. He was trying to drag her behind a big SUV, to get her out of the other man’s line of fire. He was trying to save her.

  The girl was fighting him. She was struggling hard, screaming at him, frantic. Gary was shouting, too.

  “Bethany!” he said. “Wait!”

  The man aimed his weapon straight at the girl.

  Gary saw it happening and yanked her back again, rolling his own body to get between them, and the man’s first shot went wide.

  People started screaming louder. The sound of sirens was closer now.

  The girl suddenly got away from Gary. I can’t imagine where she thought she was going to go. She was trapped, and she wasn’t even running. It was as if she were making it easier for the man who was coming for her. Gary must have known he couldn’t get to her in time, couldn’t get her to safety. But he threw himself toward her nonetheless, knocking her off her feet and shielding her with his body as they stumbled forward.

  The man fired four times.

  All four shots hit Gary, knocking him back and down.

  Gary kept his grip on the girl and crashed down on top of her. They hit the ground together, the girl’s forehead smacking onto the pavement with a sound I heard from twenty feet away.

  I was running at the gunman by then, throwing myself at him to smash into his chest—as his gun went off once more, then twice. We fell together into a car door.

  The man bounced off, but I was twisted and dropped straight into the gutter. I wrenched my head up to see that police cars were now hurtling into the street.

  The man with the gun was back on his feet. He glanced over to the girl and saw a swelling pool of blood across the sidewalk. He hesitated. Then he turned and slipped away, dodging into the crowds.

  I pulled myself up onto the sidewalk, pushed myself up to hands and knees. Crawled over to where Gary lay.