Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  He zipped the bag, hefted it over his shoulder, and hurried into the rough.

  A high-caliber barrage shredded through the car and tracked him in the dark.

  He switchbacked and hairpinned, leaping low hanging branches, dodging tree to tree, and still the bullets kept coming, whining past his head and spitting wood and dirt around him. Wild countryside under a clouded sky at nearly five in the morning should have been perfect for evading marauders.

  Whoever the hell was out there had thermal imaging.

  He gained on Jill, a shadowed blur under a covered moon.

  Sequins or sparkles, or whatever those things were on what was left of her shirt, caught and reflected the occasional glint of skylight. He followed as she slunk between trees, heading south to where the terrain sloped up and rocks along the bend created a natural ridge that provided cover where they could hide and return fire.

  They’d been there a dozen times over the years.

  There were similar strategic blinds across the property, along with Clare’s traps, and hidey-holes, and emergency stashes of food, water, and ammunition.

  He and Jill had sweat and bled and fought from every one.

  Possibilities and their divergent paths flashed warnings in his brain.

  Either Clare had blown her home up or someone else had.

  Nothing on this property would do them any good if tonight belonged to Clare.

  But the alternative was that much worse.

  CHAPTER 4

  JILL

  AGE: 26

  LOCATION: NEAR BLANCO, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA

  NAMES: JULIA JANE SMITH

  RIFLE TO HER SHOULDER, SHE SWUNG THE SIGHTS LEFT IN A SLOW grid, scanning the dark, trying to separate shadow from shadow, hoping for betrayal in a gleam or movement or snatch of reflected light. She got nothing but darkness—darkness, and the dry stench of dust and burned rubber and the final wishes of smoldering fires that had never fully caught—darkness, and the sound of jackboots crunching gravel toward the car.

  She’d counted three of them, all heavier, bulkier, and slower than Clare.

  The same Clare who, through Jack, had ripped her away from a perfect evening. The Clare who, for reasons no one but the voices in her head would understand, had dragged her into another training session.

  Clare—that Clare—had hired goons for this hit.

  Least she could have done was show up for her own damn live-fire war game.

  Jill notched the rifle down and reversed right.

  If the boots were smart, and she hoped they were, they’d push her and Jack hard and keep them running while the dark held them disadvantaged and vulnerable.

  Another hour or so and dawn would arrive as the great equalizer. There’d be no challenge in daylight.

  Her finger scratched the trigger guard.

  Jack slid in beside her. “Anything?” he said.

  “Three,” she said. “You?”

  He sat on the ground, back against the stone, and said, “Same.”

  She repositioned the rifle barrel into the jagged gap between the rocks, exposing her heat signature where the foliage was thick enough to distort what would have been an instant target into something that warranted coming in for a second look. She said, “You spot Clare?”

  He thumped his tool bag down between his knees. “Nope.”

  “The mercs might be distraction,” she said. “Keep us focused in one direction while she pops us from another.”

  He unzipped the bag and dug through it. “Could be.”

  His tone held the same irritation she felt, and probably for the same reason, but clipped sentences meant he was angry and the only way she’d get whatever else was in his head was if she apologized for taking his stuff and then asked nicely.

  That wasn’t going to happen.

  She returned to the sights and scanning the darkness all the while her purse, just out of reach, sung to her with sweet, distracting temptation.

  She brushed her lips against her hand, caressing the chewed-up webbing between thumb and forefinger, memento to battery acid and permanent reminder of the first time panicked on-her-feet thinking hadn’t gone according to plan. She’d been eight freaking years old, trapped alone in the dark and chased by monsters before she’d even had a chance to unpack her bags.

  That had been Clare a lifetime ago, on their first night in Sofia, Bulgaria.

  And that had been Clare everywhere else, before and after.

  Here they were again, same monkey, different circus.

  The purse and its contents sang louder and sweeter.

  Jill glanced at Jack, then back at the night.

  A little fortification would go a long way toward making this wack episode tolerable: a quick hit, a special something-something to speed the time and get this over with so she could take the experience, throw it in a sack, toss it off a bridge, and drown it to death, same as she did to every other PTSD memory tied to Clare.

  Her fingers stretched toward that relief.

  Beside her, Jack pulled a vacuum-sealed pack from his bag, tore it open, and shoved a T-shirt at her.

  Reverie interrupted, she batted him away.

  “Reflections,” he said. “You’re a liability.”

  She glanced at her top, slid down beside him, traded him rifle for cloth, and shrugged into the shirt. What she really needed was shoes. The strappy pieces of shit looped around her ankles wouldn’t get her a whole lot farther. He knew that. And he also knew she knew his Barefoots were still flattened down in their own space-saving pack at the bottom of the bag.

  She motioned for them.

  He plopped a pair of rubber-soled socks into her outstretched hand.

  “Seriously?” she said. “I could have taken the shoes when I had your stuff.”

  “You should have,” he said. “Now you can get them from your own damn bag.”

  She gripped the socks.

  She hadn’t carried a tool bag in years—hated that she’d ever had to carry one, hated everything the bags represented—and even though having gear on hand had saved their asses down by the car, she hated the sting of betrayal that came from knowing Jack still hauled his around like he was Clare’s little bitch.

  Her own damn bag was, like, seventy-five miles north, stuffed somewhere in the back of her closet—probably didn’t even have shoes—and the only reason she knew where to find the damn thing was because Clare had insisted they update burner phones a few months back and had made her trade the old one for new. Now that shoulda been a big fat clue that there’d soon be stink in the air.

  Jill shoved the socks on over her sandals.

  Jack put a finger on her arm and stilled her.

  He said, “Where are the dogs?”

  She cocked her head to listen.

  The only sounds rising above the night were those from the road.

  The silence was wrong.

  Clare had a pack of Kangals and Anatolians that ranged the property, 130-plus-pound, fiercely protective guardians with keen hearing, thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed, and booming vocals that kept Clare and her menagerie of animals safe from coyotes, cougars, bobcats and, of course, human predators. Even if she’d put the dogs up to prevent them from getting shot, they’d have gone nuts from the gunfire. They should have heard them.

  Jill returned to position against the rock’s natural divot, returned to scanning the grid.

  Jack reloaded his bag and strapped up.

  The quiet lagged on, and quiet was the worst. Once the shit started flying, things got easy. Waiting for the unexpected, knowing it would eventually come—that was what messed with your head.

  To the night, she whispered, “Come out, come out. . . .”

  A branch snapped below the ridgeline.

  Not Clare. Clare would never be that pathetically stupid.

  Jill rolled away from the gap and dragged the rifle back with her. Jack tapped his arm and motioned past ten feet of open space to the series of
outcroppings that marked where the downhill slope began.

  Jill gripped the rifle and grabbed the purse. She knew the drill. They needed to know where the enemy was, and needed to know what skill level they were up against.

  They’d been there, done that often enough that explanation wasn’t necessary.

  She counted, took a breath, and bolted into the open as live bait.

  The night reacted with a quick burst of automatic fire.

  Trigger-happy gunmen didn’t speak highly of Clare’s choice in hirelings.

  She scrambled and rolled.

  The bullets followed, chunking into stone.

  She crab crawled toward the end of the outcrop, where she could take a shot of her own and the night went quiet.

  No dogs. No sounds from the brush. No gunfire.

  She held position, waiting for muzzle flashes, and received only darkness while the boots, silent and invisible, advanced.

  She had no patience for the dragged out cat-and-mouse shit.

  She yelled, “Hey, short-dick monkey-ass scratchers, over here!”

  Darkness. Silence. Nothing.

  She stood, torso above the rock for the briefest second to add a flash of light for their head mounts, and ducked again. Loud and singsongy, she said, “Hope she’s paying you pussies good, ’cause tonight you’re gonna get pounded!” An angry burst replied from the left, an ego-filled grave marker.

  Jack’s rifle answered with steady, controlled reports, once, twice.

  The muzzle flashes went dark, stayed dark.

  Grunts from the cannon fodder said he’d hit something.

  Jack set the rifle aside, struck a match, lit a fuse, and pushed a Tasmanian Devil into the open. The firework sparkled and shrieked and exploded in multiple heat flashes, flooding the immediate area with colored light that would feel like a migraine in a mosh pit to anyone using thermal imaging to search for them.

  He scurried from his blind across the open distance between them and pushed her on back into the open again toward a boulder in the near distance.

  They had the high ground. They’d tagged enemy location. And the boots, wary of another heat flare, would move a little more cautiously now, and that bought them time.

  This was kids’ stuff.

  There had to be some new trick from Clare still coming.

  She followed Jack down the natural curve, using fortification in the hill’s flow to stay out of sight, flitting from outcropping to tree to crag, guided by moonlight and memories—far too many memories—in a race around the bend to the bottom.

  The hill evened out into a tree-filled dip that marked the north turn toward the nearest of Clare’s buried hides. Jack cut sideways for a hunting track that ran west.

  Not the opposite direction, but definitely out of the way.

  Jill caught up and nudged him north.

  He touched her wrist, letting her know the redirection was deliberate, and he pushed forward at an unfair pace that left her sock- and sandal-clad feet at the mercy of the elements and her bare legs and arms torn by every branch that cared to snag her.

  She kept up without a word or whimper.

  To complain or ask him to slow would be the same as admitting he’d won, and she’d never give him the satisfaction.

  He plowed on for another ten minutes and then stopped, turned in a small circle, and scrambled off trail into the brush, heading more or less toward the creek, where water only flowed during the rains. He zigzagged, pacing like a treasure hunter running a metal detector over the sand—a treasure hunter who’d lost his goddamn mind—and she was losing patience—and they were losing time.

  Jack dropped to his knees and crawled into a thicket.

  She waited, confused.

  He hissed at her, and so she went in after him, musty earth pressing against her hands, decaying foliage fresh in her lungs.

  Leaves and branches grabbed her hair. Bugs flew into her mouth and nose.

  Jack found whatever he was looking for.

  He pulled hard and shoved up.

  “Go, go,” he whispered.

  She reached him and scooted past for a rectangle in the ground.

  It was small, like a coffin for two.

  Tandem burial.

  This wasn’t Clare’s. This wasn’t marked on any map.

  She hesitated. Jack pushed her, and she tumbled in. He tossed his tool bag down past her feet, fell in beside her with his rifle, and pulled the lid down over them.

  The already dark went pitch black.

  The quiet went deafly silent.

  Ragged breathing filled the space.

  They were two phlegmatic monsters in the closet.

  Time passed. Her heart rate slowed, and her senses acknowledged what they’d been too busy to recognize before: the coffin, this thing they were in, smelled of moldy wood that had been left in the dirt for years, yet a fresh breeze brushed across her face.

  She twisted a hand over her shoulder, found the outline of a screened vent, traced upward, bumped into foil-lined fiberglass twelve inches above her nose, and it dawned on her then what this was. The airflow vents weren’t just for oxygen, but also to dissipate their heat signatures, making them virtually invisible to the outside.

  In times like these, twins or not, she truly hated her brother.

  Jack had built this hide on Clare’s land without Clare knowing and had put it here God only knew how long ago and for what reason.

  She’d never ask him to explain.

  Nothing he said would clarify in a way that made sense, because this was Jack, and this was what he did, what he’d always done: he planned for the inevitable, and he planned for the absurd. He was worse than Clare. Sure, she’d started him on this path, but he’d taken psycho contingency planning to a whole other level on his own.

  Jill elbowed him in the ribs, a cheap shot, because no matter how badly Mr. Responsible wanted to return the favor, she was crazy enough to escalate, and he wouldn’t risk an attention-drawing fight.

  She jabbed him again, because she could.

  He ignored her, and time began its slow, slow march toward dawn.

  Her left hand loosened its grip on her purse.

  The temptation was still there, just as sweet, maybe a little stronger.

  Her fingers twitched, and her insides craved.

  She wanted the benzos now, something to put her out so she didn’t have to smell these smells and breathe this air or remember the many ways the past linked to the present. In her mind’s eye, she unzipped the purse, found the Xanax bottle, popped the lid one-handed, and got that pill to her mouth. But in real life, she couldn’t.

  Not with Jack beside her.

  He’d know. He already knew, but knowing and experiencing were different things, and she didn’t want him to know in that way.

  She didn’t need his judgment.

  That she cared what he thought made her hate him more.

  Sound filtered in through the ventilation shafts.

  Outside, somewhere close, the boots tromped through the brush. She could feel each step, dulled by insulation, and knew it was gut instinct and imagination filling in for lack of sight.

  She and Jack were feet underground, buried alive under dirt and wild grasses.

  They could die here and never be found.

  Panic and claustrophobia might have risen had the scenario not already been so familiar. Different year, different country, but she’d been here before.

  This was déjà vu.

  CHAPTER 5

  JILL

  AGE: 5

  LOCATION: CÓRDOBA, CÓRDOBA PROVINCE

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: ARGENTINA

  NAMES: JULIETA MARIA SUAREZ

  EVERYTHING WAS DARK, SAME AS SINCE CLARE CLOSED THE LID, AND soft and silky but smelly, like old, wet clothes. She and Jack could fit just so side by side, if they kept still and quiet. They had to stay here a long time. That’s why they’d practiced so much, every day a little bit more in the wooden box beneath the hous
e.

  It was hard to keep from moving for so long, even with the practice.

  Clare said the box was a coffin, and a coffin was where people went when they died, and that she should play pretend like she was dead.

  Jill didn’t know how to be dead, and she didn’t want to ask Clare, and, anyway, she couldn’t, because Clare left a long, long time ago.

  Forever ago.

  Jill was hungry now and thirsty, but she knew from practice that if she ate all the food and drank all the water, there’d be nothing left for later. Last time she’d cried from being hungry. Clare said it was her own fault for having poor self-control, that she deserved to be hungry, and if she didn’t stop crying about it, she’d go hungry for a week to teach her to be stronger. Jill had made herself stop crying.

  Now she knew how to wait and be hungry.

  This time she’d wait until she couldn’t stand it, maybe even another five whole minutes. She closed her eyes and pretended she was blind.

  She opened her eyes.

  It was the same kind of dark either way.

  She thought about that, closed her eyes, and opened them again. She couldn’t see anything. Maybe she was blind for real now. She didn’t want to be blind. She held her breath so she wouldn’t cry and wiggled closer to Jack.

  If she was blind, then Jack would keep her safe and everything would be okay.

  Jack’s hand moved, and she saw the light on his wrist.

  The light made it feel like there was more air to breathe and chased the tears away. She wasn’t blind for real! She snuggled closer to her brother.

  Clare had given them glow-in-the-dark watches to pass the time. The watches had a special mark, and when both hands went dark, it meant they should come out. If Clare hadn’t come back yet, they’d have to push the lid open and crawl up to the house and carry the tool bags to the grocery store at the end of the street. Only that grocery store, because it had the special phone that could call all over the world, and they would call the number written in permanent marker on their thighs.

  Jack patted her shoulder. Then the earth shook.

  Jill grabbed on to him, and he grabbed on to her. They waited, and it shook again, and dust fell down onto their faces. Then came the sirens, lots of sirens, and soon enough there were people yelling, all of it far off and away, just loud enough that they could hear and knew that something bad had happened.