Steel Breeze

by Douglas Wynne

  The morning humidity had gathered high in the darkening sky above the cornfield, the thick, cloying air prescient of a storm. Ash-gray tatters of cloud trailed down to touch the horizon in the north where it was already raining. When the storm rolled in it would be driven by the lash of summer lightning, but for now there was only a distant rumble of thunder like the rolling of taiko drums droning under the sawing of cicadas in the sun-bleached stalks. No wind stirred the corn until the two cars came roaring to the edge of the field, trailing dust and startling the crows to flight.

  Shaun Bell sped past the maze entrance where his katana lay concealed in the cornstalks. He hit the brakes; the car slewed sideways in the dirt and almost crashed into the rickety porch where a neglected ticket-taker’s podium stood wrapped in cobwebs both real and theatrical. Sensei’s car screeched to a halt a few feet behind him. Within a heartbeat, the old man was out the driver’s door and advancing with his sword drawn, the pale blade glowing in the diffuse evening light.

  Bell stepped backwards toward the wooden arch that invited patrons to TOUR A WORLD OF TERRORS. His other sword, not as good as the one in the corn, not as sharp and maintained, was deep inside the building, in the Japan room where he’d used it for his act. He might reach that sword before Sensei cut him down. It was a slim chance but at least he would be drawing the old Spirit Warrior away from the maze. Bell took a step backward onto the creaking boards of the farmhouse porch. Sensei stepped forward slowly, matching him step for step, stalking with the trance-inducing eye lock of a predatory beast. Neither man was dressed in the traditional garb—no belts and skirts to hold scabbards. As Sensei approached, he lowered his sword to waist level, the hilt pointed at his target, the blade held at an oblique angle that made the killing edge difficult for Bell to see. It could flash out at any angle, at any second.

  “We’ve been killing the wrong people,” Bell said.

  Sensei’s face—etched bronze framed by a curtain of silver and black hair—was impassive yet menacing.

  “Deak Parsons never had a son,” Bell went on. “If he has a grandson somewhere, it’s not from the man I killed on the green. All they have in common is a name.”

  The rotting boards groaned under Sensei’s advance, and Bell, still walking backwards, put a hand behind him to feel for the doorframe. At some point soon he would have to turn and run. “And Tibbets, the one you wanted most, I looked him up too before I left the house. When he died in 2007, he had a grandson in the Navy, but no granddaughters. So those girls you killed in Ohio…. Who were they?”

  “Where is the boy?” Sensei whispered.

  “Just because Tibbets was living in Ohio when he died, you think everyone in the state with the same name is related to him?” Bell felt the doorframe under his fingers, and the curtain.

  “The boy.”

  “And I took your word for it. All of it. We could have been killing anyone. Random strangers. All that bullshit about karma, about the sins of the fathers…bloodlines….”

  “Give me the boy, and you can go. I will spare you.”

  “No.”

  Bell saw a glimmer of silver, as if Sensei were holding a flashlight instead of a sword hilt. He felt the muscles in his legs and torso twisting reflexively, heard the zip of the katana’s blood groove and felt the breath of sword-wind on his left cheek, followed by a scattering of wood splinters as the blade cleaved into the doorframe. Sensei could afford such a bold move against an unarmed opponent, and while the old man worked his blade free of the rotted wood that had greedily embraced it, Bell chanced a backward glance at the door, gripped the knob in his sweaty palm, and pushed through into the dark interior of the Palace. He could lose Sensei in here, could take a route as convoluted as a path through the corn maze inside this building where he knew how to find the hidden doors, the staff passageways that ran behind and between the exhibit rooms. But he’d barely taken one step into the darkness when two sounds stopped him in his tracks: the labored whine of an underpowered car coming up the dirt road, and the high, thin cry of a child floating over the corn, calling out, “Dadday!”

  Sensei pivoted, a swift, graceful rotation, hips following eyes following ears toward the cry of his prey. Holding his sword low, gripping the hilt with both hands, the blade trailing behind him, the old Spirit Warrior ran across the road and vanished into the corn just fractions of a second before Desmond Carmichael’s SUV bounded into the space he had just occupied.

  * * *

  Desmond saw a black-clad figure cut in front of the car. There was too much dust on the windshield for him to make out more than a silhouette, but it was the size of a man and moving fast. By the time he hit the brakes, it had already disappeared into the corn, and his first thought was that he should have accelerated and hit the fucker. Drelick was drawing her gun while jumping out of the lurching car as it rebounded from the sudden stop. Desmond felt his heart thud in his chest, mimicking the car, startled by the impact of a second dark figure sliding across the hood. This one knocked Drelick sideways. She slipped and fell to the ground but kept her hands locked on the grip of her weapon, which she trained on the second man, now following the first into the maze.

  “FBI! Stop or I’ll shoot!” she bellowed. But he didn’t stop, and from a half-kneeling position in a mud puddle beside the car, she fired two shots. They crackled across the sky, but only tickled the corn stalks.

  Desmond got out of the car and ran to help her up, but she was already on her feet when he got there. She held up a raised palm and pushed the air with it, signaling him to stay back, and then sprinted down the aisle of corn. Desmond had only caught a glimpse of the first man, but was pretty sure he’d seen a sword in his hands. The second man appeared to be empty-handed. The pair had been running from the building and into the maze before the car arrived. Desmond took a few steps in the direction of the porch with its wooden demon masks, threatening signs, and peeling paint. If the men were leaving Lucas behind in there, could he possibly still be alive? It was like walking through water. Desmond didn’t know if he had the strength to step inside and search among the fake horrors for a real one. Then he heard the siren of Lucas’s voice, a sound he would recognize even among a chorus of children all calling out the same word, a word that gave him back the only identity he wanted in the world: Daddy.

  Desmond ran into the maze, his sneakers slipping on fallen husks. He could hear the mechanical beating of angel wings off in the distance—a helicopter coming in response to Drelick’s call. He trotted behind her, watching her move with both hands on the gun, holding it low, aimed at the ground but coiled and ready to spring up. He guessed she had good form, prayed she was good enough to save Lucas. There was a slight stagger in her step, as if she were favoring one foot. He would have felt better if her partner were with them, or if she’d let him carry her ankle piece. He felt helpless, merely a witness, and he touched the silver fountain pen in the front pocket of his jeans; a talisman, a piece of Sandy that he had tucked in before leaving the house with some inarticulate notion that it would bring him luck and strength. The pointed tip slid under his thumbnail and sent a flare of pain through his hand. Maybe he deserved something worse for being here as an impotent bystander at what might be their son’s murder. The shot of pain roused him from his creeping fugue and grounded him in the moment.

  He could hear a clanging of steel on steel now. Lucas’s crying went silent. Had he realized that yelling would only help the bad men to find him? But weren’t they the ones who put him in the maze in the first place? It didn’t make sense, and neither did the sound of sword on sword, but he was pretty sure that was what he was hearing.

  He jogged along behind Drelick, huffing to keep up. She stopped at the end of a row and flattened her body against the corn, somehow slimming her profile without rustling the stalks. She glared at him, but he refused to stay back more than a few paces. The noise of the duel around the bend was unsettling. There were long moments of charged silence, followed by rapid flurries, clang
s, and grunts. He could see Drelick’s chest rising and falling in a slow, deep rhythm. She seemed to be gearing up for action, preparing herself for it while the swordsmen were engaged with each other. When she looked at Desmond again, her eyes were wide and somehow brighter, kindled with the fierce energy of being alive in a moment when death was circling the perimeter of the campfire, looking for an in.

  Sotto voce, she said, “You stay put. I don’t need another victim.”

  Desmond shook his head.

  “You need to let me do my job and save your son. I can’t be worrying about you.”

  “He’s my responsibility, and I’m coming.”

  She looked away from him and took one last deep breath, her breasts pushing her stiff white cotton shirt at the lapels of her black blazer. Rain began pattering on the pale green husks, blooming in dark gray spots. Drelick rounded the corner, bringing her gun up level with her eyes as she moved beyond Desmond’s line of sight. He slipped into the position she had just occupied and peered around the end of the row. He couldn’t see Lucas, and for a second he thought he might pass out as his body floated on a swelling wave of relief, the tension he had been holding onto so tightly now momentarily unwinding.

  He saw the fighters—one, a young American man with long dirty-blonde hair in a ponytail, the other a short, sturdy, Japanese man with silvered black hair and bronzed skin, his eye sockets deeply wrinkled at the corners but his body exuding the limber vitality of a much younger man, as if his old face were only a mask. Their swords were locked together in a block, low down near the hilts. Their faces were close, like lovers reading the prospect of a kiss in each other’s eyes, when the old man somehow swiveled his sword around, breaking the lock and thrusting the butt of his hilt into the young man’s face, breaking his nose with a crunch that Desmond could hear from all the way at the end of the row.

  Drelick took the opportunity to close in, but the motion of her approach caught the old man’s eye, and he brought his blade around with a twirl as he spun to face her. The gun was clearly trained on him, and it prevented him from finishing his opponent. The younger man—his lips, chin, and shirt drenched with blood from his nose—darted through an opening in the corn row while the old warrior turned to face the oncoming threat. It looked like a point-blank shot when Drelick finally took it after a wildly unnerving pause in which Desmond felt simultaneously terrified that she was taking too long to aim, and impressed by the cool control she was exercising. The shot boomed out, crackling across the sky. It seemed incredible that such a loud sound could come from such a small gun. The sword flashed out in a silver streak from the old man’s left hip to his right shoulder, faster than a shooting star, but with a white spark and a sound like the ringing of a bell at the center point of the arc. Drelick uttered a weak, frightened sound that could have been a laugh, but sounded more like a trembling sigh of awe. Her reaction cost her the chance to fire a second round before the samurai could recover his balance. He saw it in her face and disappeared through the opening in the corn.

  Desmond’s legs felt numb, anchored to the ground. Had he really just seen a man whose eyesight should be failing cut a bullet in half in midflight?

  Lucas’s shrill voice rose from the center of the maze again, calling for him. Desmond wobbled on his heels a couple of times, overrode the inertia of his terrified body by sheer force of will, and followed Drelick deeper in.

  Around the next bend they came to three openings. The rain was picking up, turning into a thin gray curtain, hissing in the stalks. On the ground, brown puddles danced with droplets. Drelick was running along a dead-end aisle, listening to the corn, trying to rule out the leftmost of the three paths. She didn’t give it much time, and Desmond didn’t know if she had a reason to choose the middle path or if it was just a coin toss she made in her head to save time, but that was the one she ran into without so much as a glimmer of eye contact toward him.

  Desmond scanned the mud at the threshold of the right-hand path and, finding no footprints, followed Drelick.

  He caught up with her before the next set of openings. She was stepping through a roughly reaped gap in the corn, making crunching sounds as she stepped on the freshly felled stalks. There was nothing stealthy about following this trail chopped by one of the swordsmen. It looked to Desmond like whoever had blazed it was desperate for the quickest, most direct exit possible. Then he saw the drops of blood on the fallen husks and his heartbeat doubled in his chest at the thought of Lucas before he recalled that the younger man had been dripping blood from his nose after the hilt strike. But his heart didn’t have a second to settle back into its regular terrified register before he heard Lucas shrieking, “No! Lemme go! Let goame…. Daddy! Help!”

  Desmond knocked Drelick aside and charged through the curtain of rain and broken stalks, the razor edges of husks swatting and slicing at his face and fingers as he stumbled and fumbled and raked his hands through them.

  Then he could see Lucas’s face above a collar of twisted duct tape that had left a sticky gray film on his lips, wet hair clinging like strands of kelp to his forehead, the water on his face a mixture of rain and tears. His small body was draped over the left shoulder of the man carrying him; the younger man, it had to be. A rag tied around the man’s right leg dripped blood as he staggered on, limping under the weight of his hostage and swinging the sword in long strokes to clear the way ahead. Lucas’s eyes found Desmond and widened, his face suddenly infused with a desperate feral energy. He kicked, flailed, and cried, “Daddy!”

  The swordsman heard the change in the boy’s voice and rotated toward Desmond, swinging Lucas to face behind him. The rain had thinned the blood on the man’s face, but there was enough of it smeared across his mouth to make him appear grotesque when he smiled at Desmond. There was something strange and unexpected in that smile, something genuine that seemed to say, So you made it. He stood there smiling, the sword in one hand, rain sparking off the blade, and the boy in the other, with no direction open to him.

  “Put him down,” Drelick said.

  The young man’s eyes had a faraway cast when he spoke. “You can’t save him.”

  Desmond felt Drelick’s bullet whiz past his face. It opened a blossom of blood in the middle of the man’s chest, and brought him down.

  Lucas was running toward Desmond now, shrieking in the aftermath of the deafening shot, but Desmond turned his head to look in the direction the bullet had come from. Drelick was in a shooting stance, legs shoulder-width apart, her Glock gripped in both hands. Beyond her, the old man swept into view, raised the sword above her shoulder, above his head, and when it reached the apex, brought it down in a fluid stroke like water gliding over a stone shelf, sluicing through her long hair and cleaving into her body at the juncture of shoulder and neck. Blood sprayed Desmond’s cheek before he could scream.

  Drelick fell forward, squeezing off another shot reflexively as her fingers curled inward. The bullet missed Lucas, burrowing in beside the first round in the young man’s kneeling body. Then she was face down in the cloddy mud, the old man’s foot already in the small of her back, giving him the leverage to yank his embedded blade from between her shoulders. There was a sickening sound of suction as it came free. The samurai stepped over the body, bent down, and twisted the gun from her clawed hand, then cast it high over the corn.

  Lucas crashed into the back of Desmond’s knees as he had so many times in the days when life seemed long and sweet, days when getting bowled over by a hyper toddler had tested his patience. Now the collision felt like a bittersweet gift from heaven because he knew that they would be going there together soon. They were in a dead end, surrounded by corn that the younger swordsman had failed to cut through to an adjacent path. All that mattered to Desmond now was that death came quick and that he not be spared, God help him. He wanted to go first. It was selfish and wrong, he knew, but he wanted the old man to take him first so he didn’t have to live with a dead son for even a minute.

  But the
old man rushed right past him and bent beside the fallen young man whose breath was coming in lurching, ragged gulps. The old samurai knelt and laid his sword down on the ground beside him in a way that seemed ceremonial. Then, laying his left hand on the ground first, followed by his right he bowed low to the young man, touching his forehead to the ground. “My son,” he said.

  The samurai would take up his sword again in a moment to finish them, but for now Desmond and Lucas were insignificant. Both swords were within the old man’s reach in the wreckage of fallen stalks, and although the helicopter was getting closer now, the sound of its beating blades inspired no urgency in him. He would strike when he was ready; he would pay his respects and not be rushed. The child and his father posed no threat.

  Desmond held his hand over Lucas’s mouth lightly, but firmly enough to communicate the message: Don’t make a sound, don’t wake the dragon. He put his mouth to Lucas’s ear, felt the fine hair brushing against his nose and lips, and whispered, “Close your eyes, Lucas. Just close your eyes and keep them closed.” He kissed his son’s temple.

  Lucas turned and stared at him, eyes wide and white. Then he shut them, squeezing tears from the corners.

  Desmond looked down at Drelick’s body. Her hair was turning darker in the rain, her blood thinning in the water. Her ankle holster was still concealed by her black rayon slacks, but there was no way to reach it through the narrow channel of corn without crawling over the body and even then, no fast way, no silent way. She was close to him, but the old man was even closer.

  And which leg had he seen it on?

  He thought it had been on the left, but he wasn’t sure. He stretched across her body, her blood soaking through his shirt, and clawed at the black fabric of her pants but couldn’t expose her calf.

  Greg Harwood’s hollow voice echoed in Desmond’s mind. He could see the haggard patsy in his prison smock, clutching the phone receiver, mumbling something about “Reapers…. Death angels in black skirts. Two of them.” These two men had approached Harwood with the bloody sword that night, the night Sandy was murdered. And the younger one, the one dying in the corn, the one Desmond was already thinking of as The Apprentice, was wearing an indigo hoodie. This was the one who had tried to warn him of what was coming: The Dragon, The Master, the one who had cut Sandy down in the dark, just as he had cut Erin Drelick down right before Desmond’s eyes.