Nine days ago . . .
The woman’s voice was gone.
Her touch was gone, though Finn could feel the cold echo of it on the flesh of his throat.
The feeling of being in the presence of something whose very nature defined overwhelming sickness was gone.
And yet the horror of it lingered.
The experience had sent creeper vines of atavistic dread deep into the vulnerable fabric of Finn’s soul and they had taken root, but the source—the unknown thing that had spoken to him—was gone.
She had wanted to barter with him.
Barter.
Finn had refused. Even here—whacked out with pain and out of his damn mind—he wouldn’t barter with some unknown and invisible thing whispering to him in a cave. Right? He demanded answers of his own fractured memory.
What will you give me for what you want?
That had been her question. Over and over again.
No, he’d told her. I won’t make any bargain.
That’s what he’d said. Right?
Right?
As he thought that, pain flared on his chest and he cried out.
Had the woman-thing cut him? No . . . it felt more like a burn. Had it been there before? Had she put it there?
Finn tried to pry open the memory of the last few minutes—hours, days?—to remember what he’d told her. Wanting his memories to be of nothing but ferocious denial.
But the hinges on the vault of his memory were rusted shut.
He needed to get the fuck out of there. Right. Fucking. Now.
With a growl and a sob and a surge of every muscle, Finn O’Leary tried once more to move his body . . . and this time he could. He rolled over without restriction.
Without pain.
It was so abrupt, so different than all the other times he’d tried to move, that it actually frightened him, and he froze there, turned halfway, waiting for a flare of pain or damage or wrongness.
The moment stretched and stretched . . . but nothing, externally or internally, tried to stop him.
The old market-stall cave was still as black as pitch, but Finn was able to roll all the way onto his chest without bumping into anything. He paused again, belly down on the cold rock. When everything up until now had been a heartbreak or a cruel trick, Finn expected only those things.
The darkness around him was as still as death.
No screams.
No echoes.
Just the irregular rasp of his own breathing.
He slowly placed his hands on the ground—aware that he could now actually feel his hands, and his arms. Everything felt normal. He lay like that for a moment, searching inside his body for the pain of injuries. For shrapnel cuts, for bullet wounds. For any of the damage he’d felt after the ambush.
But there was nothing to feel. Just a deep, abiding weariness that seemed to blow like a cold November wind through the empty chambers of his heart.
Finn took a slow, careful breath and then pushed against the ground. He expected it to be like jacking up a truck. It wasn’t. The hard muscles in his arms responded with more than enough strength to push his chest and stomach up from the rock. His upper body peeled away from the ground with no resistance at all.
He paused again, took another careful breath, and got to his knees. To his feet.
There was no trace of light in the tunnel, and that was weird, because there should have been some bounced light from around the curved bends. The channel simply wasn’t long enough to be this dark.
He ran a hand across his cheeks. He’d always had a heavy beard, and back in the world, he had to run an electric razor over his face twice a day. He’d shaved this morning. Now his cheeks were heavy with stubble. A day’s worth at least.
Shit.
Finn slid one foot along the ground, found no holes, then did the same with the other foot. Moving like someone doing tai chi. Moving in slow and silent motion, like a blind mime. Part of him thought that was funny and a weird little laugh bubbled from between his lips. But the laugh was ugly and strange and it scared him. You don’t want that kind of laugh coming from your own mouth.
The laugh hitched his chest, though, and that triggered a flare of pain. Surface pain. Something on his skin that he’d somehow not noticed. Or been too dazed to react to.
Finn stopped and plucked at the buttons of his shirt. His body armor was gone; his shirt was torn. Beneath it, his scrabbling fingers touched his skin and he hissed.
He’d been burned. Nothing else feels like a burn. But the weird thing was that this burn felt old. A day or two old. He gingerly probed at it and realized that it was big, and when he traced the outline of it the whole world seemed to go suddenly cold.
There was a wide, flat central burn with five thick lines running outward from it.
Put all that together and the shape became obvious.
A handprint.
Someone had branded him with a burn in the shape of a hand, fingers splayed.
God, he prayed, let it only be that. Evidence of torture, a rude gift from the Taliban.
Only that.
Only that.
Otherwise . . .
Finn had a vague, buried memory of the woman placing her hand on him. Whispering to him in the dark and touching him.
Right. Here.
Like she’d been marking him.
He reeled sideways until he crashed against the wall. She put her mark on me. Christ Jesus on the cross.
And then the realization of that wound tugged at a thread of memory stitched into his mind. With the memory came her voice.
We are agreed then. Here is my seal upon it.
“No way, you fucking bitch,” he said through gritted teeth. “I didn’t agree to nothing. You hear me? Nothing!”
Only the wind and the shadows and the rocks heard him.
Desperate to escape the cave, he shoved himself forward, staggering through the shadows with awkward steps. Expecting pain, expecting hands or worse to tear at him, but he didn’t trip, didn’t bump his head.
Five paces. Ten.
A dozen.
Then . . .
He had to blink several times to make sure that his eyes weren’t lying to him.
“Light,” he said aloud. The word “light” floated in the darkness and for a few terrible moments, he didn’t know if it was a lie or the truth. The light was a ghost of a thing. Only enough so that the shadows weren’t a uniform black, but rather pieces of a greater darkness.
He licked his dry lips and took another step, moving in the direction of the light.
Four tentative steps later he was sure that there was light down there. He could see the faint outlines of rocks rising from the floor or hanging like fangs from the ceiling.
Eight more steps and he could see his own hands. A sharp cry burst from between his clenched teeth. He was covered with blood.
Was it his blood?
Finn stopped and touched his chest, his stomach, his limbs.
If he was hurt, then where was the wound?
If he wasn’t hurt . . . ?
“God,” he breathed, and the word sounded too loud in the dark tunnel. It echoed badly and took on different meanings as it ricocheted past him.
He took a few more steps, and now the light began peeling the shadows back in layers. The palette of the moment changed from black to brown. The color of the desert, except for the sheer walls of gray rock. However, in that light, he could see that the blood was the brightest of reds. A garish scarlet from a cheap paint box.
He tried wiping his hands on his thighs and on the walls, needing to clear his skin. To clean his hands. He spat on the stubborn spots.
He got a little of it off.
Not much.
And that made him want to move faster. He stumbled forward, falling into a clumsy run, his boots barely lifting from the ground. He left smudged and elongated footprints in the sand behind him.
His breath came in ragged gasps as if he was running uphill.
At the end of each inhalation, there was a little squeak of a sound. Almost a whimper.
“Stop it stop it stop it,” he told himself, but his voice lacked conviction.
The light was stronger just around the bend ahead. He could smell the air, too. Clean air. Not the stale air of the tunnel. There was wind, too, whispering past the mouth of this motherfucking tunnel.
His stumbling run turned into a sprint as he bolted for the light.
He burst from the mouth of the cave, a smile carving its way onto his filthy face, a sob breaking in his chest as he flung off the last of the shadows.
He stopped and leaned against a boulder to catch his breath. There was movement to his left and Finn spun, drawing his pistol, raising it, pointing it.
A boy stood there, his face turned away. He wore a loose kameez over shalwar—the loose pajama-like trousers—with a kaffiyeh wound around his head and simple pair of dusty kabuli sandals. His clothes were streaked with dust but the only bloodstain on them was an oddly shaped splash of red over his heart. It looked like a desert rose.
“Boy . . . ,” said Finn in Pashto.
The child did not respond, did not seem to hear.
Finn said it again in Dari.
The boy stiffened and suddenly began running away. As he did so, he pressed the wrappings of his kaffiyeh to his face as if trying to conceal his features. Finn tried to run after him, but he was too weak and dizzy. He snaked out a hand and caught one trailing edge of the kaffiyeh and pulled. It jerked the boy almost to a stop and made him half-turn—and that revealed more of the boy’s face.
Only it was not the face of a boy.
It was the face of an ancient woman. Withered beyond belief, scarred, ugly, almost bestial. Her skin was a livid red, almost the color of blood, and her nose was caked with clay. She opened her mouth to hiss at him, and Finn saw that instead of teeth she had a pair of razor-sharp tusks. The woman spat at him and tore the cloth from his hands. Then she spun and ran as lithely and quickly as a young, athletic child.
Finn could never hope to keep up.
He stumbled along and finally ran down to a sloppy stop, bent over, hands on his knees, panting, confused and terrified and sure that he was losing his mind. Minutes dragged past and the world around him seemed to steady itself down to become nothing more than mountains and sand and a hot wind.
Finn pushed himself erect and began walking along the path that led through the old town square, looking for answers, for the thread of sanity he’d lost. Looking for the sight of the ambush. Looking for his men.
He found nothing for a long time, and he was beginning to think that there was nothing to find. That he was irretrievably lost out here. Or that he was mad and imagining all of this as he lay dying somewhere. He gave up trying to make sense of it. He summoned what strength he had and began to run in the only direction that promised any hope of an answer—back the way he’d come.
But the day was not done with Sergeant Finn O’Leary.
He took five steps, but each one was slower and less steady than the last. His final step was broken and he realized that he was falling. Not onto his face again, but down hard onto his knees. His body weight collapsed as the air flew from his lungs in shock and defeat. Finn knelt there, slumped like a despairing supplicant. His hands hung slack at the ends of his arms, palms up, fingers curled like the legs of some pale, dead spider.
Spit glistened on the rim of his lower lip and as his unblinking eyes took in the things that lay tangled in the dust, the drool broke over the edge of his lip and ran in a crooked line down his chin.
Tears burned into his eyes and they fell, too, cutting like acid down his cheeks.
He looked at the things that lay scattered around the clearing that had once been a town square.
Red things.
Ragged things.
Torn and broken. Defiled and discarded.
Three of them, lying in broken humps that did not add up to the orderly shapes of men. There were too many bad angles. There were parts that should have been connected and stubbornly, stupidly were not.
Bear was the closest.
Or at least Finn thought it was Bear.
But his eyes . . .
His eyes were gone. The flesh around the holes burned to blackened leather. Smoke curled upward from each socket, but the smoke seemed to glow as if fires still burned inside the dead man’s skull.
It was the same with the others. They lay on their backs, faces pointed to the sky. Fiery smoke rose from their eye sockets.
You know what has been taken, and you want it back. That’s what the woman said.
What will you give me for what you want?
What indeed.
God . . . what had he told her?
How had he answered that horrible question?
There was a rustle and he spun around. Bear had turned his face toward Finn.
Finn stared in horror, trying to understand this. Was it rigor mortis? Was the heat from the fire shortening the tendons in Bear’s neck? Was . . .
Jazzman and Cheech Wizard turned their heads, too.
All three of his men stared at Finn with eyes that were nothing but fire and smoke. With the eyes of hell.
All Finn could do was scream. It was the only reasonable response to this. It was the only choice left to him.