Old Jim stared out from the banks of a sandy, slow river held in deep shadow by ancient trees. Ravens walked on the flat rocks in the middle of the river. The dark of the canopy felt intense, the sun coming through only as a dappling, branches reflected in the water. He was a vessel with a guttering candle, left on the bank, and could not move. He was the water or the air, and neither the air nor the water could be called just that, if you looked close enough. People lived invisible and impossible in the water, or had become the water, or something else lingered there and he could not change his view to be certain. All while there came the pull of a distance he could not discern through the trees, a green light, a cleft between two mountains and he had the sense that if he just traveled farther down the river, he would see—
The sounds of distant gunfire—one, two, three, four gunshots or shouts. The ravens, like splotches and ruptures of blackness, became spooked by the noise, rose, and disappeared into the trees or became the trees.
He woke in an unfamiliar bed, a lounge chair opposite with Brigade files on the seat. From the way the cushions had been pushed flat, someone had been sitting there a lot.
His eyes and mouth felt dry. His head seeming to weigh more than his whole body, so he couldn’t think of moving. He thought he’d seen Cass the last time he’d woken up, her hair short and the wrong color, as if in a dream. He struggled to rise, but all that happened was that the sound of water over the rocks came close again, and in no time at all, he was in the water, becoming the deep water, becoming …
Woke again to the sensation of a centipede curled around his brain, under his skull, fast-fading.
“Stay still, stop trying to move,” Cass said, but gently, from somewhere overhead or to the side, from below or above. He hadn’t been able to open his eyes yet.
“You snored like gunshots or shouts, or someone did,” he tried to say with his dry mouth, but it came out in a mumble or an exhaled breath, wasn’t important anyway. He had a pain in his abdomen, like a muscle strain, but also as if someone had placed a stone egg inside of him, next to the muscle.
He opened his eyes. Cass had pulled up a stool bedside, her hair short and blond, just like he’d thought.
“You’re lucid? You know you’re in the loft bedroom of my apartment?”
He nodded.
“Water?”
He nodded again.
Cass offered him a glass of water from a table next to the bed, helped him sit up, held it for him as he drank. There was a softness to her that surprised him.
“Let me check your pulse and take your temperature.”
Her gaze told him it was important.
“C’mon, at least your pulse, or I’m not telling you what happened.”
Now he got it. She was concerned he might be impaired in some way. So he offered up his arm. He felt helpless as she held her thumb on the vein in his wrist, counting.
When she’d finished, she carefully placed his arm back by his side.
“Pulse is a little high, but not by much. Good.”
He lay back in bed, ghost to a headache, the skylight in the slanted roof framing the crisscrossing branches of trees. Did she live in the forest? White walls balanced by rustic wood for the ceiling. Someone had undressed him and put his pajamas on him. He felt vulnerable, exposed.
“Your hair…?”
“Call it combat ready. You’ve been out of it for a while.”
An impatience and energy was rising in him.
“So, what happened?”
“A lot.” A curious mixture of frown and smile lived on her face, and he could see the tiredness in her eyes.
“How long?” He tried to keep the panic out of his voice.
“Three days,” Cass said, giving him an evaluating look. “I brought you here so I could keep an eye on you.”
“Three days?” That took him by surprise. “I don’t remember that—getting here. Or much else.” His mouth opening wide and wider still to erupt words toward the Rogue. There was a deep ache throbbing down his back and left arm.
“Are you ready to hear everything?” she asked, with kindness.
“Yes.”
She hesitated, still assessing him, then said, “Someone ambushed you at that little bridge. I shot at them as they tried to get away. Pretty sure they took one in the chest. Someone torched Old Decomp. And the psychics on Failure Island found an alligator harness, using your bobber.”
The alligator harness felt like a trap somehow. How he felt about the Rogue was complicated, but it was hard not to mourn the stone silo, all those peculiar and oddly beautiful dead things no longer even a memory of flesh, but just gone, forever.
“That’s a lot,” he said.
“I told you.”
Old Jim rose half up out of the bed, but Cass pushed him back down.
“No. Stay in bed a bit longer. Just to be sure.”
Covers thrown back, Old Jim could see his feet. He was wearing socks with a bunny pattern on them.
“All I had, promise,” she said.
He decided not to challenge her on that.
A couple of hours later, Cass helped him downstairs and dumped him in a chair at the kitchen table. He had no doubt she’d hauled him upstairs herself and wondered why she’d made the effort. A leather couch, another TV, and a terrarium full of water and plants next to the couch.
“What’s in the terrarium?”
“Two clawed frogs that look like plastic and don’t move much,” Cass said. “I call them Jack and Jackie.”
Maybe he should have found “Jack and Jackie” funny, but he didn’t.
She brought him some coffee. “Not sure you need this, but…”
He took a sip, his mind lighting up.
“What did you tell Jackie?”
“That you have a cold, that’s all. I wanted to let you decide what to tell her.” While she cracked eggs into a bowl, looked for a whisk.
“How’d you know to look for me? At the bridge?” She’d seemed distracted last he’d seen her in the bar.
“I noticed as soon as you went into the office. I think I’ve told you not to use that back door for breaks … and I’ve been keeping an eye on you.”
Emotion so strong it surprised him.
“Thank you.”
Cass poured the eggs into the frying pan, contemplated the sizzle and pop.
“Jim. I wouldn’t have been caught dead on that bridge after dark. Fully exposed. A sniper could’ve ended you. And there would’ve been nothing I could do. You know that, right?”
“I’m not myself.” Had he imagined shouting at the Rogue, and its effect on the man?
“Are you sure?”
She was asking if she could rely on him. Checking his pulse again.
“Any chance I could get another glass of water?”
“It’s already there.” Miraculously, it was. Right in front of him.
“While you eat breakfast, let me tell you about what happened on the bridge.”
Cass had found him by the screams that cut off suddenly, at the entrance to the bridge, on his side, trying to get on all fours, bruised and weeping. He was striking out blind with his knife, such that Cass thought he had impaired vision.
At the far end of the bridge, Cass saw a figure moving forward, and put two rounds into the general direction of his chest, which caused him to dive into the reeds beyond the bridge, soundless, so she didn’t know what she had hit. Cass had the definite impression that it was a man. No, definitely not Henry. No, not anyone she’d recognized, like Man Boy Slim.
Moving cautiously, Cass had ventured as far as the end of the bridge, saw no movement, heard nothing, except what might have been a gator in the middle distance, in the water. Blood spatter on the boards led into the grass. Enough blood to believe she did him damage.
There were no fingerprints, no shoe prints, nothing but the blood. She’d sent samples to Central and then wiped the scene clean. After securing the site, she’d tended to Old Jim, making sure he had no critical injuries. He’d put down the knife by then, despite having no recollection of having drawn it. Disoriented, his eyes were bloodshot. Cass recalled that he had kept talking about a candle and a flame, “some other weird shit.” A winter journey.
So Cass had gathered him up and gotten him into the bar office, put him on the cot they kept back there for naps, and gotten Trudi to examine him, there being no Brigade medic within easy call.
“You thought Trudi would be happy to return the favor.”
“Something like that.”
Old Jim found himself more concerned about Trudi seeing him like that than the breach in “protocol.” What was protocol when you used psychics like sniffer dogs?
Trudi could find nothing wrong except that Old Jim had “obviously experienced a trauma.” Cass had alluded to “a history of seizures” as cover and, after Trudi left, had taken Old Jim to her place.
By midnight, Old Jim was deep in sleep and she’d gotten word that Old Decomp had gone up in flames, someone breaking in, lighting a match, and boom. “The chemicals in the jars acted like accelerant. The stone held but became an oven, baking it all until the roof eventually blew off.” The outer structure, burnt out, still stood, but the contents had been obliterated for the most part.
By the next morning she’d received word that the psychics had identified the general coordinates of what they believed to be an alligator harness identical to the one they had been given.
“Oh—and here. One thing from Old Decomp survived. Must’ve been hidden among the sample trays.”
She placed a photograph on the table.
It took Old Jim a moment to recognize what she’d taken a picture of: small, half burnt and inchoate, slurred by flame into less of a compact object than a memory of its function.
The remains of a rabbit camera from twenty years ago.
Funny, how the world could change so quickly. A week ago, he would have rejoiced at finding a camera. Now, he recoiled, had to force himself to relax back into his seat.
“Send it to Central as soon as you can,” Old Jim said. He didn’t want it anywhere near him, Cass, Failure Island.
“I already did. I didn’t handle it. I didn’t let anyone touch it directly.”
Old Jim nodded, relaxing. He didn’t believe Jack was that sloppy, that R&D was that sloppy. They would have found a camera in the biologists’ samples long ago.
So how had the camera gotten there?
He thought he knew.
Old Jim got dressed. He asked for any new reports he’d missed to be brought along when they went out. Didn’t he want to rest? No, he didn’t want to rest. He felt an attenuated rejuvenation in that moment. Sally could mind the bar, the psychics would self-medicate and self-manage on Failure Island for another day. Jackie could cool her jets.
They would visit the beach not to catch his breath, but to see where Cass had found the harness. And then? Then maybe he’d rest or maybe not. But hadn’t he just rested? And now he had to catch up, outthink, outrun the source of that “rest” for him.
He’d survived the Rogue, and now it was time to plunge ahead, even if that meant transport via Cass’s crappy hatchback, with its lurching five-speed.
They drove to the coast amid an impossible yearning on Old Jim’s part—impossible because he didn’t know what he yearned for, an incurable, reckless energy rising in him. An impatience with his dreams, an irritation with piano music. Beating a rhythm against his leg with the fingers of his left hand. He liked that the weather had gotten cold, that maybe they’d see glimpses of winter, soon.
They reached the little strip of beach where the harness had been found, parking in the cul-de-sac of concrete that marked the farthest point of civilization. The coast all around consisted of wildlife refuges and state parks.
Old Jim found the trees here strange—either dead snags like ragged spikes sticking out knee-deep from the salt water or the sand pines that grew gnarled but tall, with few lower branches but a sudden opening up to a verdant green fan shape at the top. Nothing else grew here. Nothing much suggested other than the stark idyllic, other than the vague outline of a freighter at the horizon line, well beyond the chatter and swift glide of gulls.
Sift through thin lines of dead seaweed and barnacles to know your future, or maybe just your past. When what he really needed was to know what the hell was going on in the present.
He sat on a fallen tree trunk become driftwood, at the edge of the cul-de-sac, Cass standing beside him, shielding her eyes from the glare. She surveyed the beach as the wind buffeted him in a way he found comforting. Eternal.
“What is that?” he asked, pointing to the “structure” in front of them. A half circle of stone in the shallows just offshore, cradling the mud flats that had formed in front of it. Three more jagged spines of tree trunks stood in front of the stone, evenly spaced. The harness had been tied to one of them.
“A place that was different once,” Cass said. “And will be again.”
The water had crept inland, as water will, and the trees had died of it, and what had been a kind of observation point had been buried in sand and reduced to a ruin—a crumbling fortress for fiddler crabs. He hated that he now saw anything unusual as suspect.
“How close were they?”
“Who? To what?” Said softly, like she was considering something shimmering far out at sea. The place had that effect. Was it calming or was it just so much bigger than them?
“The psychics. Tell me about it.”
“Beacham’s Point, they said. Very specific. Only this one way in and out. They saw it ‘in the thoughts,’ as they put it.”
“Whose thoughts?”
“I don’t know. The ones who saw it are still in a sub at the bottom of the sea, conducting other research.”
“They must have said something.”
“Just that, and I quote, ‘a mind had revealed itself and we could read it amid the static.’”
“I don’t believe it,” Old Jim said. “I mean, I think the Rogue lets them see what the Rogue wants them to see. Or did.”
Cass was giving him a look and he just stared out to sea.
“Full report soon,” she said, “but you have to admit they were right. Do you want to examine the harness?”
“No.”
“Brigade forensics will be all over it, but I doubt they’ll find anything,” she said, sagging down beside him on the log.
“What about all these tracks?”
One reason he hadn’t wanted to walk on the beach was to think about the tracks first. He could clearly see Cass’s boot prints out to the snag, although not back. But from the suggestion of a double imprint on some, she’d just stepped back the way she’d come, to avoid contaminating the scene further. Smart. He wouldn’t have thought to do that.
“Yeah, there’s been a lot of traffic on this beach. Popular with animals for sure.”
Cass’s were the only human prints. But he could see paw prints, cascading lines, bird feet, and a thick dislocation as of something wide pulling itself along parallel with the upper shoreline, positioned between two lines of sea wrack.
“What do you see?
“There’s a lot if you know how to interpret it,” Cass said. She rose, pondered, pointed: “Raccoons there, lots of them, a whole battalion of raccoons. Herons. Tons of shorebirds. A bobcat. A couple of snakes, though sometimes opossums drag their tails. You’ve noticed there are no shoe prints except mine, I hope.”
“Snakes on a beach?”
“Happens all the time.”
“How do you know this, about animal tracks?”
A wistfulness he put down to homesickness in her reply. Like, maybe she thought she could never go back there.
“I learned it growing up in a place like this. Different latitude and longitude, but similar. I had a dad who took me fishing and hiking. You didn’t have that?”
“No.”
And what he had now, even in this calm place, was still the feeling that he had gotten in over his head. But she hadn’t mentioned the most disconcerting mark on the beach, so maybe she felt the same.
“That long, wide track, like something sliding through…?”
A massive creature, with imprints to each side, as if something like starfish hands had been uncontrollably shaking against the sand. With odd traces of coquina and moss to the sides.
“A very, very large alligator, I’d guess.”
“It swam out of the sea?”
“Alligators do that here.”
They were silent, then, staring at that premonition of the past, Old Jim contemplating Cass’s tracks in the sand. The way the harness had been tethered to the snag. This idea that the Rogue had been “hiding out” for twenty years—it still didn’t make sense.
“The Rogue didn’t burn down Old Decomp,” Old Jim said.
“He didn’t,” Cass said, in a vaguely distracted tone. Was she still intent on his physical condition?
“The Rogue wouldn’t have left the camera. The Rogue would have taken the camera. And what would it accomplish, anyway?”
The way the Rogue had adapted to circumstances, to be feeding cameras to an alligator. Whatever that meant. More likely Man Boy Slim left the camera, burnt the place down. In which case, who cared?
“I’ve been thinking about how we’re floundering.” Still in that detached tone that worried him, as if she was weary after taking care of him for so long.
“Why do you say that?”
“While you slept, I got the blood sample analysis back, the one from the bridge. Not human. Alligator blood. I’d made up a story about wildlife studies relevant to ‘foreign entities.’”
Old Jim considered that—the part where the Rogue was actually the Tyrant.
“Are you sure—”
“I shot him. Twice. In the chest. There was no gator. As far as I can tell, despite there being no body, the Rogue is in bad shape right now.”
The Rogue could have killed him on the bridge—could have used prosaic methods and means. Shot him. Stabbed him. Bludgeoned him with a baseball bat. But instead, the Rogue had tried the same trick as before. The house centipede trick.
So why hadn’t it worked? Or worked as intended? Or had it failed? It must have failed.
“Here’s your gun, by the way,” Cass said, and unclasped a shoulder holster, heavy with metal, and handed it to him. “Ammo’s in the car.”
He stared at the Walther like he’d never seen it before. Well, he guessed he was behaving normally, if she’d returned it to him.
“We have to go to Dead Town,” he said. “Now.”
“Why?”
“Because everything started there. Because in my office the alligator tracker had blinked red there.”
Because Dead Town was like a suspect he had to rule out.
He felt her gaze on him, realized if she objected, he wouldn’t push back.
But all she said was “Dead Town it is then,” and walked back to the car.
While he contemplated some version of eternity. That endless horizon of sea, that peculiar altar to the memory of ruins. All the little fiddler crabs frozen in front of him, next to their holes, wondering what he would do next.
Wondering if he would be merciful or lay waste to their homes, burn everything down.
Nothing like the old days, those old days he’d never known on this Forgotten Coast—now there was a halfway reliable route you could take to Dead Town.
On the way, he found out Cass liked to listen to punk music. Cass also liked to race her hatchback down dirt roads, not much caring about the jostling, her window open a crack, so dust still swirled in, but she grinned wider like that made it better. With the punk music blaring, which just sounded like noise to Old Jim.
“Did I tell you I used to like off-road racing? This ‘stupid little hatchback’ is actually souped-up, which I didn’t expect.”
He’d been so impressed by how spotless Cass’s car was that it had taken him a little while to realize when it didn’t fall apart after ten minutes that Central must’ve had the shocks reinforced and swapped out the engine block.
She radiated such an unencumbered joy when she had to shift gears suddenly or when they threatened to drift and mire on the sandy parts of the road. Relishing the challenge, leaning forward in her seat to see better what hazard lay ahead, whether whipping branches or even mud in the ruts from the recent rain. But then settled down, tapping her finger against the steering wheel during some song at odds with the music on the radio, which fizzed and spat at times, reduced to static, then cleared up, fizzed, cleared up. Repeat.
“No country stations?” Old Jim asked.
“You like country?”
“No.”
She laughed. “Punk isn’t for you. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I don’t even know what this is.” It struck him as the opposite of Winter Journey, which agitated him.
This feral energy to her today that he recognized, this nervous energy because they were headed into the unknown. She loved movement, he could tell, was happiest in motion. And she’d had to look after him for days.
As they watched the countryside roll by: meadows and forests, run-down shacks in the middle of nowhere, farms gone to ruin, overtaken by pine trees and vines. Every once in a long while a man with a shotgun and a hunting dog who stared at them with a stoic interest.
Old Jim noticed that Cass’s mood dipped when she had to slow to a crawl, a creep, at the turnoff onto a road lined by barbed-wire fence and overgrown with long grass, ending at a locked gate flanked by a bog and a thicket of wax myrtles.
As she took the key out of the ignition, her smile became flat affect, her gaze inward-turning, and her body seemed to take up less room.
He checked his firearm, put a new clip in the magazine, while Cass reached for her pack in the back seat.
“You ready?” she asked, opening the car door.
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Born ready.”
She winced at the cliché, but it was no worse than her own quips. Just like old times with Jack, is what had him frozen. In a car. On foot. In a helicopter. A prop plane. A boat. Bicycles once. The terrible bad old times. No, it would be nothing like that, would it?
“I’ll take point,” she said.
“Expecting trouble?”
“Low probability the Rogue is here, if alive, coming back to the scene of the crime,” Cass said.
“If the Rogue thinks like other people.”
“You watch our six. I’ll take care of the rest.”
She’d produced a machete from the trunk.
“Bloodthirsty.” Besides his gun, all he had was a camera slung over his shoulder. Didn’t know what he’d be taking photographs of, but that was kind of the point.
“It’s going to be overgrown. Try to keep up, but if you need a break, let me know.”
He trusted her at least enough not to protest that he could keep up.
They approached from the north, down the east side of Dead Town. From the files, Old Jim believed no one from Central had been there for more than a decade, and no one else had, either, from the evidence of the curled-over remains of barbed-wire fence and the number of monstrous blackberry patches Cass cut through.
Then it was more tall grass across a dirt path that ran beneath the oaks that guarded Dead Town’s northern reaches, leading them to a trail of coquina-like gravel shot through with vivid, low-growing yellow wildflowers.
Cass kept looking back to make sure he was keeping up, but in her silence let him know she was checking behind them as well. That made him oddly calmer.
The meadow, when they reached it, was a riot of purples, yellows, oranges, white … so many colors and hues, so it became a kind of impressionist painting, framed by the searing blue sky with stretched shreds of clouds, the sun reflecting like liquid diamonds off the marsh water.
It hurt to look at without squinting, and Old Jim didn’t know if that was the light, the beauty of it all, or what he knew about the place, but he could have stared at the meadow forever. Here the biologists had stood and drank beer and joked around and tried to ignore the odd echo of the piano from the marsh, and here, too, they had slaughtered rabbits and then themselves been undone by the Rogue.
“Beautiful, but not what we’re here for,” Cass said, as if reading his mind, and he realized he’d almost fallen under a spell. She gripped his right arm to guide him, as if she couldn’t trust he would pull himself away.
They walked into Dead Town, onto the main street, the eroded asphalt of the road cracked by vines and tree roots, overpowered by grasses that exploited every fissure. The huge, monstrous oaks looked as if they had erupted overnight amid the buildings.
City Hall still anchored the street, but unlike the surrounding buildings, it had all four walls and a roof.
They stood side by side, considering it. As if they still had a choice.
Cass insisted on making him wait at the bottom, machete left propped against the stairs, while she took the steps two at a time and checked out the roof, the third floor, the second, and then back to the first.
“I don’t think anyone’s here, or has been here for a while,” she said, popping out of the doorway. She looked more relaxed having done the sweep.
They skipped the first floor, which had a vile smell and a vista of the moldy shambles of foldout cafeteria-style tables. But the second floor, which had been the tourist center, looked more promising from the doorway.
Ample light spilled into that space from the front-facing row of glassless windows, revealing a long room tormented by neglect, and, again, mold. Oddly sweet-smelling.
The ceiling sagged in low, with tiling and plaster come down everywhere in wide strips along with eruptions of a disorienting pink insulation.
Ceiling lamps with shades shaped like oranges hung via cords, some fallen so far that they dangled just inches off the ground, while others had smashed into the floor, and still others hung with eight feet of space beneath them.
“I hate this place,” Cass said.
“There’s a path,” Old Jim said. “To the chair. See it?” He pointed to the first chair overturned on the first rug. Someone had cut away some of the wires and lamps, while tricks of perspective suggested obstacles where none existed.
“I just see a mess of wires and junk.”
“Patience.”
The jangle of lights drew the eye toward the far end, with more overturned chairs, ruined green rugs with geometric patterns, and a far counter that must have once featured tourist brochures. A curtain on a broken metal track had become a white-green blur he didn’t much care to think about.
Three booth alcoves lay against the left-hand wall, through the cords and lamps. A huge leather chair sat in front of the center alcove.
Some disturbance on the dirty floor drew his attention and now he saw not just the main path but something else.
“Could you hunker down as low as you can get and look parallel to the floor?” he asked Cass.
He expected a joke or some resistance, but instead she got down on her knees and lowered herself into a modified push-up position, looking like she had her ear to the floor, listening for a secret sound.
“I see it,” she said.
“What do you see?”
“It’s like a tunnel. Fairly wide, higher than your knee, leading to the chair. Like, something swept through from the doorway and … crawled … toward the chair. Flakes of dried mud, traces of dead moss, and kind of … an old smell. Swampy.”
“An animal’s trail.”
The dot blinking red in the middle of Dead Town, and his heartbeat blinking faster now.
“Yeah. Up here on the second floor. Somehow.”
“Like the alligator tracks on the beach?”
She got up off the floor in a hurry, wiping her hands on the back of her pants. “No sand here, but I think so.”
“Let’s use the conventional path,” Old Jim said, and led the way, through the forest of messed-up lamps, to the center alcove. Simple once you’d seen it, like someone had layered a series of bead screens to form a trail. Not simple to avoid brushing against a cord or shade, so that a wooden jangle followed them.
The trail ended at the booth alcove and the large leather swivel chair, which was covered in streamers and loops of a material like gauze or shower curtain. The slant of the sunlight left the alcove dark.
An enormous rug lay to the left of the chair, cleared of debris. The thick discoloration across the rug, impressed on that surface over time, did suggest the shape of an alligator.
“A man and his reptile.” He was already taking photographs. “The Rogue has somehow trained an alligator, probably the Tyrant, to serve him. To, what, perform a few tricks? Guard him, like a dog?”
Cass backed against the lamps swaying behind her, didn’t seem to care that she set off a chain reaction of twisted rope creaks and dull chimes.
“I don’t like the thought of that,” she said. “The Rogue with a pet alligator holding court in Dead Town. How do you hide with a giant alligator by your side?”
“He moves around a lot,” Old Jim said, not convinced of the words he was pushing out into the air. “He must be comfortable using rivers and swamps the way we use roads.”
Funny what you noticed and what you didn’t, even with training. Something about the swaying lamps made it difficult to pick out details. At the edge of the rug, in a weird shadow cast by the chair, Old Jim spied something the size and shape of a pork chop.
“Is that a … bone?”
Cass got out her flashlight. “Dried-up old haunch of something. Snack for a pet?”
Old Jim almost said, half joking, It’s a friend, but caught himself, because he didn’t like what he meant by that.
“A helper? Somehow?”
“Yes, some kind of help, mission critical,” Cass said. “Don’t touch the chair.”
Under the flashlight’s glow, Old Jim could see that a peculiar residue like golden pine dust coated the chair back, only missing from the seat, swathed in that rotting white fabric. Without the flashlight, the residue was practically invisible, but it had a hint of moisture to it, like when humidity made Old Jim’s deck boards sweat.
“What’s on the seat?” Cass asked.
“Curtain remains, like at the back of the room?”
Cass nudged the edge of it with her boot. The edge crumbled like a wafer, made more of the material into dust.
“Reads more like husk than fabric,” she noted. “Samples?”
“No, just photos. Let’s not disturb anything else. He might not come back, but let’s try to make it look like we were never here.”
But that wasn’t the reason, not really. Something about the suggestion of samples made him nauseous. Something about the failed expedition and all of their samples, stacked to the ceiling. He felt faint, like he needed water. He took more photos of the chair as if it might make him feel better, then had to stop. Some realization was coming to him from a long distance away, slowly dawning, but he couldn’t quite articulate it yet.
“Here,” he said, holding out the camera, “you take some and give me the flashlight.”
She took the camera from his hands eagerly enough, probably happy for the distraction.
“Maybe you really did hurt him,” Old Jim said. “Maybe you did, and that’s why this place seems abandoned.”
“I’m going to map this whole place with photos, even the parts off the ‘path,’” she said, and began to walk carefully to the rug side of the chair, documenting every stain, every discoloration.
She was using the flash, so he just shone the light on the wall behind the chair, curious about the hints of wallpaper. Maybe a pink flamingo pattern once, but now only gray pieces of it stood out against the off-white stucco beneath.
Some graffiti written there, just above the chair, so faded and mold-covered he hadn’t noticed before, like a ghost of a tag. Scrawled in black: NO CHANGE. BUT TOO EARLY, WRONG SEASON. Then a few anarchy symbols, it looked like, but just written with a ballpoint pen.
Then more words he couldn’t read, written small, unobtrusive.
He leaned awkwardly over the chair to read what had been written there, the chair pushed back in the attempt.
A kind of symbol drawn there, too, unfamiliar to him, with a stylized lighthouse in green. Mutterings rising in his head, phrases that he didn’t know where they came from, as if waking from a dream.
A series of words, in the casual scrawl of someone thinking aloud. Some of it he couldn’t read, but then he found part he could read.
“Follow every shiny glimmer / down the winding river bend; / The air will hit the trees / like a whistle or a ring of thunder.”
Old Jim felt a lurch, a misstep, an endless abyss. That wasn’t the Winter Journey he knew.
The metal crumpled from the bomb underneath and he lost control of the wheel and smashed against the mountain shoulder, the heat gushing into the compartment, and he couldn’t breathe, no one could breathe, and the carrier twisted, toppled, careened off the road and down the slope, toward the limitless blue above and below.
To the side of the words on the wall, the same person had scrawled a name. A person’s name.
His true name.
Trapped into blackness, into nothing, trying to get out as the flames rushed through.
A sound like a song, like music and yet not. It had a delicate quality, a questing, searching pulse, with a depth in the echoes and a comforting familiarity. It nested in Old Jim’s head, a sound that could never have emanated from a human throat, and yet what nonhuman could make music that felt like far-distant home? The beauty of it overwhelmed him as he peered down a tunnel in the reeds toward the water.
The song came louder to him, and a glimmer at the end of the reed tunnel of water stirred by wind. The hint of some wider, deeper movement, and he, drawn to it, began to crawl forward. The song made him courageous, or was it just a fey fascination he could not break. “I’ll singe every falling wave, / green field, swallow tail. / The sun up from the depths, / as I follow a flaming trail.”
The broken reeds under his palms scratched despite the cool mud beneath and in that enrapturing cocoon the brackish smell came to him fresh, and a vast and alien eye at the end of the tunnel. “You’ll find me in the scrub, / across riverbeds and distant shores; / you’ll find me in bitter mist / hover fly, bear witness.”
Was he hallucinating? Was this his death?
There came a slap of the mighty tail against the water, a suggestion of a massive body submerging.
The music ended, abrupt, and the Tyrant had vanished with it.
Left standing by the water’s edge, alone.
Dread choked him as tears fell wet from his face. He came to himself in the dead meadow, overcome by emotion that made him hide among the cascading stalks of the wildflowers, that made him grasp at the dirt on all fours, as if the feel of it could anchor him. A scream in his throat he couldn’t contain or escape, that left him raw, defenseless. The the the this this this this.
The Tyrant dragging her weight through the mud, over and through the biologists, the thrum and hum of her body like a memory of the song.
Something in his brain kept misfiring and he kept crawling on his hands and knees through the heart of the meadow as if he feared a sniper. But would he fear the tracery of bullets overhead now, there among the mosquitoes and the biting flies? And he thought he should get up, get up, but the terror hit him again, that the Tyrant lay somewhere behind him, closing fast, but no, it was not an alligator he feared or should fear and … Instead he found a clear muddy patch at the far end of the meadow and lay there on his back in a soft, comforting wallow. As if he were one of the biologists from so long ago, and he stared, mindless, at a harrier hawk as it passed back and forth above him, stitching some obscure message into the sky.
All the reverie of the dead beneath him, around him, in the molecules of the air, the water, all this great fecundity of life—and what was his life in comparison? Nothing but signal, nothing but openness, lying there wounded.
He wondered if his daughter thought of him ever, and how and why. If it was still with any form of kindness or affection. If she had regrets. If she was happy now. If it sometimes tore into her the way it tore into him.
And he might as well have lain there a century as an hour. He didn’t know if he could get up again. The smell of the mud mingled with the flowers, strong, earthy, and so full of a fragile, trembling fragrance that he wanted to stop weeping, to take root. To be mindless here and become lost, taken away and dissipated into the sky with the flock of cranes he spied swirling higher and higher still. To forget everything, to remember … nothing.
Until Cass found him there, a frantic look on her face as she stared down, and him without the energy or gumption to rise. He thought, perhaps hoped, that she would back away from the fading anguish of his affect, from the place in his mind that he thought he had moved past but kept returning to against his will. For he felt in that moment that she could have slain him with the wrong look.
“You scared me,” she said. “You just disappeared.”
He said nothing; he was incapable, and her words came to him from a great distance. But it was true: He had vanished and now had come back into himself.
Cass slid down into the mud beside him and she held him and he cried into her arms. She said nothing, did not shudder or pull away, just allowed him to be there, letting it all out, again, until it was gone—truly gone—and he was empty and lost a century or more, down in the mud, in his thoughts.
Then she took his hand, his weathered, worn hand and she told him a story. About herself, about her past. It was sad and funny and tragic and complicated and terrifyingly personal, what she told him, and although it would become, in time, just the fading memory of something beautiful he had heard once, he kept it close and fiercely private and personal.
She released him then and he didn’t dare say a word, for fear of feeling ashamed, for fear of it being the wrong word or a damaging word, wondering what, if anything, he had done to deserve this gift.
Nothing, he had done nothing.
When he had recovered himself enough to sit up, she said, “We don’t have to go back there.”
“I don’t want to.”
“We can just stay here for a while.”
The sun felt so distant and he liked it that way.
After some span of time that escaped him, Cass said, “Someone has damaged you. Badly and with intent. Over time.”
He tried to say something about the mission, the Rogue, but couldn’t quite get it out.
“After what happened at the bridge, I shouldn’t have let you come here.”
“No,” he said, “you couldn’t have stopped me. I don’t need rest.”
“That feeling might fade. It might not last. And then you might need to go to a hospital.”
When he didn’t respond, she sighed and lay back against the mud and reeds next to him.
As the bees and the wasps and the butterflies went about their business, oblivious, tending to the bright flowers.
All the warp and weft of aftermath. How it lived in his bones and his flesh so that he felt inhabited by another and made into an empty vessel. Another’s body that had carried out the mission where he’d hit the roadside bomb. Another who had lost a daughter. Holes in his head that corresponded to the holes in the Old Decomp parking lot.
“You have to get over losing her,” Cass had said on the drive back. “Just forget you had a daughter.”
“I don’t know how.” Saying words that felt remote from him.
“They don’t want you to know how. Central.”
He had no answer for that, but he could tell Cass didn’t like his silence.
“I need you to hear what I’m trying to tell you. Central made me write a letter to you, as your daughter, before I came here. I was supposed to give it to you the day we met. But I couldn’t. It was too fucked up.”
That other life. The one where he’d dumped all those letters at her feet. Jesus. How much bleak and terrible shit had she shielded him from?
“Thank you,” he said.
She reached out and took his arm by the wrist. Held it for a time, released him.
“Heart rate is little high, but acceptable,” she said. Sighed.
When they reached his house, Cass waited to drive off until he was at the door. As she left, he couldn’t quite put a finger on what was wrong. Because something was still wrong.
Old Jim lurched into the kitchen, found his way by the dim light over the stove, as if his eyes had become sensitive, because he didn’t want anything brighter. Water in a rinsed-out glass, and lots of it. He gulped it down and still he felt thirsty, although he didn’t feel hungry at all. The place smelled musty, but maybe it always had and he hadn’t noticed until now.
The strange version of Winter Journey, mutated, had entered his head, clashing with the original. “The air bleeds through cypress knees / go forth god / body bent / my half prayer spilled / through every wild glimmer.”
If he went into his office, he’d have to sit in the awful chair of a dead man. If he went to bed, it would just be a restless tossing and turning, eyes shut but mind open. Cass had asked if she should come inside and wait until he got settled, but he hadn’t liked the idea. He felt a kind of guilt over her concern—that she risked something expressing concern, a kind of instinct he had about her, one spy regarding another. Instead, she’d develop the photos and circle back for a debrief.
Old Jim checked for new faxes, found that Jack had relented about the Exiles, a bit, and graced him with Central’s R&D about the cameras. He felt superstitious about the informality of the kitchen, took it into the office and got into the monstrous chair.
What caught his attention right away was R&D’s request to reinterview the exiles—to talk to Team Leaders 1 and 2. That “to understand the substances and compounds and pheromones that created this object, we need to better understand the context of the object’s capture.”
The Rogue, out in the wetlands, “shucking cameras like oysters.” What if that was R&D too? Just from a different direction?
Not only did Central’s R&D refrain from calling the “object” a “camera,” but from the context of the request as it went through various subagencies to the Relocation Program division responsible for the exiles … it was clear that R&D did not know about the Dead Town Disaster. That R&D had been led to believe in the “accidental discovery” of “the object,” and only a clerical error in filing had allowed them to discover the names of Team Leaders 1 and 2.
Who, exactly, at Central, still knew about the Dead Town Disaster? Was it just Jack and a handful of his underlings? Did Serum Bliss enjoy the same level of secrecy? He had assumed Jack must still report some detail of his operations to higher-ups at Central, but what if that wasn’t true?
Such that when he saw the file on a prominent Brute at Central pressing R&D about the rabbit cameras, he realized why R&D had been told nothing. So they couldn’t tell anyone else.
Equally, in the other direction, Old Jim’s mistake in his requests beyond what Jack had given him was departmental. The further information on the cameras originated with R&D and had not been reported back to the department that had interrogated the team leaders.
Which meant that the entire purpose of studying the camera had metastasized as extracting any advanced or proprietary technology, to then apply to Central’s own surveillance equipment. But not just cameras—scopes on sniper rifles, the optics on bomb-sniffer robots, the proprietary elements of new microscopes.
“The alloy appears neo-biological in its compression,” the “crude analogy” that of “how lichen adheres to a rock, and is unable to survive without the rock, how moisture accumulates and is held in the rock, but also the lichen.” These kinds of “bindings” exemplified “the relationship between materials in the object.”
But it was also clear from R&D that although they could replicate by mimicry the properties of the object, they did not understand the object’s initial purpose, coming from a purely extractive point of view. Nor had the video component been working in the cameras provided to them.
Information helped, even when it made things more complex. Old Jim felt the tension in his body loosening as he read, leaning back in the chair. Even when he noticed a piece of paper sticking out from the space between the far bottom leg of the desk and the wall, hidden by the whiteboard leaning there that he’d never bothered to put up.
When he moved the whiteboard, Old Jim found a pile of burnt faxes. At first, he thought it might be a quirk of his predecessor, who had smoked. Have a cigarette, burn a fax. But when he pulled them out, the ash smudging his hands, he discovered they were all recent, and they were all lyrics from Winter Journey.
He pulled up short, let the damaged faxes fall to the floor beside the chair, as if they had been tinged with a poison. Tried to wipe the ash onto his pants. His hand swept across his pants pocket and there came a kind of pearly click or slight clang of one piece of metal against another. He frowned, didn’t remember having put the strange key in his—
Down in the depths, rising, and by the river’s bank he looked out on the ravens that were not ravens and the rocks and the green canopy, resting there as vessel, candle, flame, and the branches of the trees were opening and opening up to reveal, far off, the two mountains and the green light in the cleft between them as if it had always been there, waiting, and he’d always known that, too. He could hear a distant hum or music or chanting and it came from both the water and the air, as if both were full of invisible lives that made sound through the branches, through the river reeds and moss.
Hidden lives. Hiding from the green light, even as the army marched toward it. They must march toward it, they must fight or be destroyed. In their antiquated armor, their old weapons, their grim aspect. How they flowed into the landscape the more he looked upon them, became less bodies than waves or torrents pouring into the breach.
It was cold, very cold. He was shivering and his eyes didn’t seem to want to open. There came a voice he half recognized, half didn’t.
“Get in the barrel and stay dead. Get in the barrel with the others. There you go. No use resisting now. Just get in there nice and snug. Cover yourself in the fluid and don’t get any on me. I don’t need it, only you. It should be quick. You’ll all be in God’s eye soon, as it should be. What you did, it must have gone against God in some way. So just get in the barrel. Get in the barrel. Shouldn’t be this long. I want to go home.”
A new set of sounds, like the man had wrenched someone’s arm out its socket, that soft, hollow, distressing crack. Followed by the same sound again, like he’d done the other one. But no scream, no sense of another person.
Somehow that sound made him go dead calm. Some muscle memory, some training that he hadn’t fully used in a while.
Was this a nightmare? He would wake up in bed, and he’d just missed a step, been so tired he’d fallen asleep standing up. If he didn’t open his eyes he would return to sleep, to some kind of sleep.
But the cold felt more like being in a walk-in freezer and even with his eyes closed, he received a premonition of a blast of blue light, as if it wasn’t quite the usual, not quite real in the usual ways. The man stumbled about now, splashing liquid and sound, too corporeal to ignore.
Old Jim realized he was sitting in a chair with his arms around a huge sack, like a mailbag, which sat in his lap like he was clasping a pillow or about to hand out gifts around the holidays.
The splashing like dunking, dunking, and the faint smell of some unfamiliar chemicals—and now he was fully awake and terrified. How had he gotten here? Had he been drugged? If he opened his eyes, the person moving around might notice. So he kept them shut.
He still had his peashooter in an ankle holster. He still had his knife in a sheath at his waist. And a yawning chasm of doubt.
“Get in there. Go down easy. Don’t resist.”
The blue lights flickered against Old Jim’s eyelids. The pattern made him think one or more of a bank of lights had gone out or malfunctioned. The “mailbag” had the unmistakable slight shift and crunch of money in banded stacks. He knew it from a couple of dozen payoffs.
The voice rough, with a cough behind it like a smoker. “Yeah, like that. God loves you. God sees you. This is his path, his way. Go drown now, happy. All’s well.”
The sound of squishing, of sloshing, made his heart rate spike again. As did how he couldn’t quite trace the voice, but knew it anyway. Along with a strong sense of déjà vu that he’d spent many hours listening to this man talk.
The key in his pocket, waking up on the deck after sleepwalking.
“Why always this now, Old Jim,” the voice muttered, and his eyes would’ve shot open if he hadn’t controlled himself. If he hadn’t realized the man still thought he was … asleep? That wasn’t quite it. But the man thought they were accomplices. And the man was big, looming, the voice rumbling down to him.
He dared to squint one eye open … and, yes, he was holding on to a giant sack of cash. He was sitting in a chair with a key clasped in one hand, hugging a sack of money, listening to a psychopath talk about God while stuffing things into barrels of fluid. A psychopath who might be a mail carrier. Who had stolen a lot of cash.
The man faced away from him, clad in a … a tricorn hat? Plus a full-body black coat of some kind … bathed in that dark swimming-pool blue glow … bending over a large barrel that came up to his waist, and a thick hand gloved to the elbow pushing at some rag doll, some broken approximation of a person, with one naked foot and leg below the knee lolling at an unnatural angle over the side.
On the floor to the left of the man, two more bodies half in, half out of an archway to a much larger room than the one the man toiled in, the one Old Jim sat in a corner of clutching a money bag. That room was more like a small hangar, cavernous with a high ceiling, full of the same quavery light … and full of barrels, in some places in the back stacked three high.
He thought he recognized one of the two bodies on the floor, peering around the mailbag, using it as cover. A mid-level Brute from Central who Jack hadn’t liked—a “thwart” as Jack sometimes put it. The bloodless face turned sightless and eyeless toward the ceiling.
Did he try to run? Did he try to reason with … someone doing terrible things with barrels? Did he just fight like a thousand devils because he had no choice?
Abruptly, the huge man doing the stuffing stood up abruptly, turned, too late for Old Jim to disguise his gaze, to close his eyes again.
Old Jim stared right at him.
The black mask was so thick and wide it appeared at first made of stone, wrapping around to hide even the man’s ears. The buttoned pitch-black flaring trench coat hid his clothing below the neck. At some murky point the trench coat left off in favor of huge old-fashioned black boots, with huge silver buckles, tarnished by age or lack of polishing or an eye toward authenticity. He hadn’t been wearing those onstage.
Commander Thistle, from the bar. Commander Thistle wedded to his Monkey’s Elbow costume for unfathomable reasons. Commander Thistle shoving bodies into barrels like some kind of fucked-up nightmare. Only Jack could be doing this. Only Jack.
He prepared himself to draw his knife, but Commander Thistle only considered him a moment, grunted, half turned back to his work, then turned to Old Jim again.
“I told you, Old Jim, to keep your eyes shut. Shut your eyes. Peon. Serf. Shut your eyes. You serve them like a marching automaton. You serve them like there’s no risk in the reward. Like water lives there. Like you are on a long journey and have taken no rest. So close your eyes now. Close them.”
Old Jim felt the pull of those words, like someone was trying to stitch his eyelids shut, like a specter hovered close with the needle and thread and if he’d just relax, his eyes would be shut forever in no time at all and he could just fall back into dream, back into a nothingness that meant no knowledge, no complicity.
Except, there might be a new dream now, to replace the old one.
And Commander Thistle might be satisfied with Old Jim’s acting, or, while Old Jim descended back into that prison of nothing, he might stuff him in a barrel anyway.
Old Jim wrapped both hands around the money sack. It was very heavy, and he rose from the chair and stepped back a foot or two to give him a little extra distance from Commander Thistle.
In that ultra-blue light, that lapping, watery blue light, Old Jim could tell from the shoulder slump, the downward look, that Commander Thistle did not appreciate the interruption of his tasks. That he just wanted to get home. Maybe wax philosophical in his fucked-up brain about what it took to fit a man into a barrel properly.
“I’m leaving now, Commander Thistle,” Old Jim said, his voice raw and more fearful than he could have hoped for. “And you’re going to let me.”
A long, mournful sigh from Commander Thistle that Old Jim did not find hopeful.
“I see,” he said, with a resigned kind of crooning groan. “I see how it is. You’re the resistment type. You’re the meat thinks it isn’t good enough for God’s will. Well, I’ll tell you, if I’m good enough for the mote in God’s eye someday, you’re good enough for it now.”
The nausea that came over Old Jim had to be suppressed with anger, with the memory of past discipline. Disgust at this private cosmology, this pathology grown out of control.
It wouldn’t help to plead, but it might buy him a moment or two, to reason with a God that enthusiastically wanted people shoved into barrels.
“Listen to me,” Old Jim said, money bag still held out in front of him, unsure if he could reach and extricate his peashooter before the Commander could close the distance. “I’m an agent of Central and I’m going to walk out of here now. If you don’t let me, you are going to die here. Do you hear me? Do you understand?”
God’s eye could fuck right off. Could take a flaming arrow to its core and burn and kill God dead.
The black mask betrayed no emotion. Commander Thistle scratched the back of his head, shook himself like he couldn’t quite find the flea, sighed in a great outrushing shuddery breath.
Commander began to reach into one vast pocket of his outfit.
“Don’t do it!” Old Jim shouted, and pulled out his knife, held it with his left hand while still keeping the mailbag between them like an awkward shield.
But all Commander Thistle took out was a folded piece of paper that he delicately unfolded and then began to recite phrases from, looking up at Old Jim between each.
“‘Consolidation of authority.’ No? How about ‘have your house in order’? ‘Risk equal to reward’? ‘Check under the seat for change.’”
On he rattled, while Old Jim felt only a fizzle and tingle, knew he intended an effect similar to the generator on the biologists so long ago. But he was free of that, and the Rogue had freed him, even if now he might be bound in some other way.
Commander Thistle put the piece of paper away, as if it had accomplished its purpose. “Now get in the barrel. This barrel.” He pointed to the barrel with its lid off next to the barrel already full. “Get in the barrel, Old Jim.”
He’d noticed a small door behind Commander Thistle, a way out maybe, or just a dead end to a supply room. The archway felt too dangerous, put himself in Commander Thistle’s grasp. Maybe just let the immovable object come to him.
“I am the hand of God,” Commander Thistle bellowed. “I’ve been here before you and I’ll be here after. Get in the barrel! Get in the barrel!”
Old Jim sighed. He could die here, now, and yet he felt a kind of tedium, a boredom, with Commander Thistle’s demeanor, the way the mask almost seemed to make him as stupid as stone.
“You can get in the fucking barrel,” Old Jim said.
Commander Thistle charged like a bull, arms outstretched, and Old Jim twisted to the side, smashed the man in the face with the money sack as he stumbled past. But Commander Thistle managed to reach out a hand and get a grip on one side of the sack, swinging Old Jim farther behind him, the momentum almost tearing the sack free, and they were pulling the sack from both sides and Old Jim couldn’t stop pulling because if the tension slackened Commander Thistle could charge him again, so they swung and circled while the fucker still spoke to him about God.
The sack wasn’t up to the stress. The bag burst open and the money tumbled and exploded out, single bills and banded bills hitting Old Jim and Commander Thistle in the face, sliding to their feet. Old Jim lost his grip on the bag and went skidding up against the wall, Commander Thistle the other direction, knocking over the barrel full of bodies, which sluiced out the archway and came to rest in the other room.
Old Jim tried to get to his feet, but Commander Thistle was on him then, smashing into him like a truck, so he landed hard, air out of his lungs, and he had to gulp for air, prone next to the steel table.
But his arm knew what it was doing. His hand knew, too. So that even as Commander Thistle tried to bring enough pressure down to choke Old Jim to death, he was stabbing upward at Commander Thistle to the left side. Stabbing and stabbing with his knife through the man’s overcoat, which was thinner than it looked, and some thickness beneath. And Commander Thistle roared with pain but kept trying to bring his forearm close enough to crush Old Jim’s throat while the bulk of him held Old Jim prone and all Old Jim could do is keep stabbing as his breathing became more constricted and Commander Thistle kept roaring with each new stab. And Old Jim could feel the slickness of blood on his hand, on the knife hilt, but not enough by far. Not enough and he began to see black dots, even as, futile, he tried to arch his back, and Commander Thistle was still raging thick on top of him, a fucking boulder in human form.
Feeble stabbing ever more feeble fuck he was going to be a person in a barrel. Commander Thistle was going to break off all his limbs and fit him into a fucking barrel and he’d never find his daughter and never see Cass again and he knew—somehow knew so strong—that the Rogue didn’t want him to die. That this was not the way it was supposed to end. It couldn’t end. Even though he could hardly breathe now, and his right arm fending off Commander Thistle was beginning to throttle his own throat with the weight put on it. Fetid breath so close it almost seemed to come from his own mouth.
But then the weight left him. Commander Thistle rose staggering, clutching his side. The slickness there disguised by the black suit, but still some kind of dark faintly luminous purple. The blood that was coming out of him. That was too much for him to continue.
Up he rose, Commander Thistle, and loomed over Old Jim.
“I’m immortal,” he rumbled. “I will never die. Pathetic remnant. Lost child.”
Old Jim braced for Commander Thistle to leap on him again.
But, instead, quicker and more nimble than any big man should be, Commander Thistle ducked past him toward the little door, and as Old Jim swiveled to watch, shoved himself through that too-small door, and then into some wider space that brought in the smell of the swamp, and Old Jim could hear the echo of his running steps toward an exit, toward the world beyond.
Fucking hell. The fucker. The fucker. He’d fled like a coward. Old Jim stared after him in disbelief, the way they’d been grappling and then not, the weight had fallen away.
Groaning, he reached down, bruised, for his peashooter, felt better with it in one hand, the bloody knife in the other.
Old Jim stumbled through the door, out into the night.
“Jesus.” A familiar fence and lights through the forest beyond.
He had emerged from the biowaste facility, just three hundred yards from his own house.
Outside, girding himself for ambush, because Commander Thistle hadn’t gotten into the rusting old white van in the facility parking lot and driven off. So where the fuck had he gone?
Old Jim got his legs moving, once out in the night, under the moon, headed for his house, and how could he not, soon enough, see Commander Thistle, repatriated with his thistle wilderness, ponderous—because there was a giant swath smashed through the reeds past the trees. The man was built like a Mack truck, but bleeding a lot.
Was he running in the wrong direction? Disoriented?
But maybe he meant to head toward Old Jim’s house. And now he realized the smell of the man, the stench, he’d smelled faintly in the kitchen before. Maybe that’s why the office chair was huge. Oh fuck, what if Commander Thistle could lock him out? What if he meant to destroy documents or get Old Jim’s Walther or send for help?
The heavy, wet thwack of Old Jim’s boots against the mud, the whispering rasp of his clothing against the saw of the reeds. This feeling that, like some windup automaton, he might run out of time as he headed for his house.
The moon a jagged sickle overhead. The smashed reeds made him flinch for the Tyrant, Commander Thistle’s back now visible jerking and torquing ahead of him with the effort of running over uneven ground, but Old Jim was closing the distance, closing, because, yes, Commander Thistle, like a tank leaking gasoline, had begun to slow down. Running, then fast walking, then staggering, and with Old Jim just twenty feet away, Commander Thistle swayed more like a reed than a slab.
Old Jim’s house was close now, only about a hundred yards.
“Stop,” he hissed.
He wasn’t sure the bullet in his peashooter was enough to end this giant.
Commander Thistle half turned, to contemplate the black gleam of water to their right.
“Go to your God and beg mercy for your sins,” the man said. He’d given up trying to stanch the blood and no longer held his hand to his side.
“Who sent you? Who do you work for?”
“God sent me.”
“No, God didn’t fucking send you, you great fucking asshole.”
Commander Thistle coughed and bent over to vomit great loops of blood, could not get back to his feet again. Knelt there, unsteady.
“You were supposed to be asleep,” he said. “You weren’t supposed to ever wake up.”
The chill that came over Old Jim. Never meant to wake up. Never meant to fully sleep. Trapped in limbo.
“Jack said you might be difficult,” Commander Thistle said. “Now you’ll be difficult for Jack. He’ll put you in a barrel himself.”
Jesus Christ.
“Stuffing bodies in barrels is God’s work? Is Jack God?”
Commander Thistle’s voice came back weak and thready to Old Jim.
“They’re all Brutes. They’re all bad people. They needed God now. They got God now. Stop chasing me. I just want to sit by a window by the sea.” Plaintive, like he was losing touch with whatever reality he’d chosen to live in.
Old Jim relaxed, lowered his peashooter. There wasn’t anything he had to do now.
“My God is near but yours may be nearer,” Commander Thistle whispered, Old Jim so close now.
The giant behind the mask toppled and sprawled, finally silent, into the ever-present reeds. He expected the body hitting the ground would make a mighty sound, but it was muffled, less reverberation than vibration.
“But quick! The water slows, / its surface turns to glass.”
Commander Thistle lay awkward on his side, dead, the blood of the ruptures from the knife bubbling up pure, unhindered.
“The stars start to glow / and the sun shines its last.”
Godspeed, Commander Thistle, down to the fiery pits of hell, where Old Jim hoped he would be stuffed into a barrel for all eternity. Any sympathy he had left Old Jim meant to apply as salve to his bruised ribs.
He limped back to the house to recover, to think about the next steps, before returning to the biowaste facility. Only the porch light was on. As he reached for the living room light switch, he stopped dead. A figure sat on the couch. In the dark. In his house.
His hand wanted the real gun, the one he’d left in his office.
“Hello, Jim,” Jackie said. Some aspect of her dark, functional clothes glittered in the shadows like chain mail. No one would ever mistake her ways for those of her father.
He left the lights off so she couldn’t see the distress on his clothes, grabbed his jacket from the kitchen table and put it on. Then took a seat in a chair in the farthest corner from her.
“You’re sitting in the dark in my living room. For how long?”
“For a while,” Jackie admitted, and she didn’t want to look him in the eye. “I thought you’d be here. Where were you?”
Had she heard anything? Seen anything out the window? He didn’t think she’d be sitting there so calm. She could have waited outside and shot him on the porch, under the bare bulb, if she’d wanted him dead. This was true.
“What was so urgent it couldn’t wait until morning? That meant you couldn’t come back later?”
“I’m being recalled to Central,” she said. “To answer questions about what’s been happening here. And not by Jack. By Central.”
Oh, sure, he understood her just fine. Serum Bliss was under the radar, except maybe now it wasn’t. Someone high up the chain of command had caught a whiff of it, the decomp wafting up from a barrel, or heard the lilting, gentle sound of distant gunfire against a stone wall—or maybe something had come up in a random sweep of ops.
“What has been happening here?”
Had Jack kept her in the dark about stealing from his own op? Or funding the Brigade in devious ways? He couldn’t quite see it clear.
“I leave soon and I wanted you to know. This might take a week or it could be a month.”
He considered that a nonanswer, didn’t like it.
“You want to know if I have intel that can help you survive an inquest, is that it?”
Brutes taking verbal baseball bats to the old breed, while Jack stuffed Brutes into barrels. Or maybe both sides were playing almost as rough. While Phantoms, if they existed, laughed secretly on the sidelines. A kind of internal civil war.
A coldness spread across the chill of her sharp features, and she sat up, rigid.
“Earlier today, while you and Cass chased ghosts or whatever it was you thought worth doing … we lost two submersibles. The psychics on board set them on fire from inside when they reached the seabed. Because they were in contact through distance messaging with others on Failure Island, three more S&SB personnel are in comas, nonresponsive. The building caught fire and we don’t know why yet. For now, files and records are being evacuated and any Central personnel with them.”
“That’s a shame,” he said. He had no surprise or shock left in him.
The shock, instead, registered on her face. “You have nothing for me? No analysis? No guesses?”
He shrugged—and as if she took that as provocation, she took something lying in the darkness of the couch next to her and tossed it at him. The entanglement of it as he caught it felt familiar. A red bobber, a tracker.
“Or was this just a waste of our time?”
“Where was Henry?” Thinking of belt buckles in parking lots.
“We’re looking into Henry, but it’s unlikely,” Jackie said. “He relied on that place to analyze what he’s found at the lighthouse.”
Debatable, the logic of psychopaths, but Old Jim didn’t want to debate it.
“Where in the building did the fire start?”
“Forensics lab, we think.”
The alligator harness would’ve been in the forensics lab. Maybe that was a coincidence, or maybe it was the point, the Rogue still one step ahead of them.
Old Jim decided to give her a stale crumb, while he mulled his choices, given the number of dead bodies, the large amount of money lurking just out of view through the forest.
“We found something at Dead Town that might be an old sign of the Rogue,” he told her. “We took photos, will file a report.”
His ribs ached worse when he breathed; his hands had cuts and dried blood on them, yet in some ways he felt sharper than he had in years.
She was leaning forward now, intent. “You know, the next one they pull in to Central will be you. Jack may have Central still thinking you retired here, but not for long. They might trapdoor this entire operation and disappear us all.”
The closest Jackie would ever get to pleading, but Old Jim was unmoved. Numb.
“Then I guess you’d better be convincing. Good luck with that.”
It didn’t even matter that Jackie had turned into knives again, in the way she stared at him.
“Get us something we can use, Jim. A villain. A scapegoat. Anything.”
Burn fuel to protect themselves, create sacrifices. He wanted to say, You can’t give me up or Jack goes down. But soon enough Jack would find out Old Jim had crossed some invisible border and whatever bond Jack saw between them would break. He didn’t know what that new world would look like, but it might be grim.
“I’m working on it,” Old Jim said. “We haven’t had enough time, but we’re close.” Any old reassuring bullshit he could think of.
“I sent Cass back to Central this evening, as a delaying tactic. That also allows me to tie up a few loose ends before I join her.”
The surprise of hearing those words, disorienting, like he was back in the biohazard facility, sitting in a chair with his eyes closed, holding the bag. They were going to debrief at the Village Bar. They were going to find the Rogue.
Cass’s hand on his wrist, checking his pulse.
He’d stopped breathing, had to remember to start again. How Cass had stared down at him from the ladder at Old Decomp. How he’d stared up, ready to break her fall.
The empty chair in the apartment as he recovered, her files strewn across it.
“Are you still with me, then, Jim?” Jackie asked.
Grotesque to him, that she said it like she was truly concerned.
“I’m sure you’re right. This will all blow over.”
He forced the words, clipped, out of his mouth. It wouldn’t help Cass to express concern for her. It might doom her.
Old Jim rose, opened the door, stood there, waiting for her to leave, jacket zipped tight.
“I guess you’re done, huh?” Jackie said, giving him an appraising look.
“I’ll hold down the fort until you get back.”
She looked wary as she got up and paused there in front of him. As if she could read his mind, how some part of him wanted to scare the shit out of her. Make her feel what he was feeling.
“Good luck at Central,” he said.
Jackie stared at his messed-up hands, which had begun to throb even worse. The blood crusted across his enflamed knuckles.
“What have you been doing tonight?” Jackie asked.
“Just sleepwalking again,” he said. He couldn’t look at her.
“Is this about Cass or the mission?”
“I’m just tired,” he said, because he was tired.
“You’re not going to wind up drunk on the street again?”
“No.”
“She’ll be back. If Jack survives. If I do.”
Said quiet as she walked by, into the night, into the distance.
He closed the door behind her gently. Lines from Winter Journey a pressure in his head. “Now, I see a shifting signpost / shimmering beneath my gaze, / but I must travel on, a ghost…”
For a long time after Jackie left, Old Jim just sat there, in the dark, pondering his next move, if he had one.
Cass was gone.
Again.