The Flicker Men (32 page)

I climbed to my feet and moved out, keeping to the edges. I saw a hole in the wall ahead and crossed into another room. And then another. The holes made a path through the ruins. Ahead of me, the wall split; I took the corridor on the right. There was a sound ahead, and I froze in place, heart beating wildly. Something was coming. I saw a doorway to my right, so I ducked inside. It was a small room—a foreman's office of some kind, walls stained black. Windows bashed out. A single wooden desk had collapsed itself into the floor. Thirty years ago, it might have rivaled Jeremy's desk, but now it was rotted and broken, the legs knocked off.

As the footsteps approached, I ducked behind the desk, trying to make my body as small as possible. The footsteps grew closer, and I pressed my face to the floor, one eye searching through a split in the back of the desk. A gap in the water-swollen wood where I could see into the other room.

There was movement that my eye couldn't follow. A pair of legs crossed in front of me, the ghost of fabric.

Where was Mercy?

The legs disappeared behind a column momentarily, and I shifted my position for a better look, and then I saw him. A familiar man.

A man I'd had dinner with. A man who spoke of wines and museums. A man who'd had my friend killed.

It's all in the perspective of your blade.

Brighton crossed the room, and I got a good look at him. He wore a dark hunter's jacket, caked black at the sleeves by dust and dirt. His pale gleaming eyes searched the shadows but found no reason to pause. He disappeared around the corner.

When he was gone, I waited for thirty seconds before I stood and crossed the hall in the opposite direction. As I ran, I kept my eyes open for Mercy, hoping to catch a glimpse. Outside the air was fresh and clean. The sky was blue. I felt exposed—visible from a hundred angles.

In the distance, shots rang out again. Somewhere up ahead.

I turned and ran the other way—cutting back through the building. Heart hammering. I ran blindly, wanting to put distance between myself and the sounds. I ran until my lungs burned and my legs cramped.

I nearly tripped over Hennig.

He was a man of halves. Half ear, half body, lying just beyond the hangar door. Looking down at him, I was again acutely aware that I didn't have a gun. I stooped and picked up his shotgun from the mud. The barrel was covered in blood, but it still looked functional. I gripped the weapon with both hands and ran.

I crossed the threshold of another building without stopping or slowing—I simply held the gun vertically as I sprinted through the doorway. Another warehouse. Another empty expanse. I didn't stop until I found myself in a narrow alley between buildings, blue sky overhead. I crouched with my back to the wall. My breath came in gasps. More shots rang out. Hennig was dead, so the sound meant Vickers or Mercy.

I cracked open the chamber of the shotgun, and I saw only a single round.

It crossed my mind that a single bullet could end it all. I pushed the thought away. I willed my heart to slow and tried to calm my breathing. I'd need to think clearly if I was going to get out of this. I waited. Minutes passed while I watched the gap in the alley, and then I heard a rattle in the distance. Feet on corrugated steel—the tread light and quick. I bolted off the wall at a dead run, threading my way between structures.

Two minutes later, I found her. It was Vickers. I saw her hiding against a wall at the edge of the clearing. The sun threw short shadows behind the buildings, so I moved behind a pile of rubble, trying to stay out of sight. The ruins around me looked familiar, and I realized where I was—the place where we'd gathered wood. The fence was a hundred yards across the tall grass, up the hill. All the running, and I was nearly back where I'd started, a hundred yards from the encampment.

Up ahead, something moved along the rutted track.

Vickers still had her back to the wall, crouched low. She was bleeding from the nose. Bleeding from her head. Her eyes moved to scan the buildings, flitting in my direction, and I opened my hand to her—just a slight movement, but she caught it. She started to step out from the wall, and I waved her back.

Brighton was coming.

She stayed.

Brighton moved slowly between the buildings, pale eyes scanning the shadows.

My eyes watered, and I blinked in the angle of the sun as the grasses waved in the wind. Behind Brighton, a second man was coming up the trail. “
Boaz
,” I heard myself whisper.

I realized they would cross right in front of where Vickers was hiding. There was no way she'd be missed.

As the men came closer, Vickers pressed herself tighter to the wall, face expressionless. She couldn't see them from her vantage, but she heard their shoes on the gravel.

Thirty feet away.

I waved her a warning, but she did not see. And anyway, there was no place for her to go.

Twenty feet. I could see Brighton's eyes searching—looking left then right, as he moved up the road.

“
Turn around
,” I whispered to myself. “
Go another way.
”

Ten feet.

“Shit,” I said.

I stepped out from my place behind the rubble and took three steps into the clearing. I raised the shotgun, forcing myself to see the thing I was aiming at—to
really
see—runnels of black light flickering around his body like the wings of a thousand buzzing wasps. I pulled the trigger.

The gun lurched. The sound was deafening.

The slug clipped the edge of Brighton's left arm in a snarl of fabric, and a moment later, a cloud of dust burst from a wall behind him.

He looked down at his own shoulder in surprise. Then he turned toward me and roared—an inhuman sound of rage and pain.

I dropped the empty gun and ran.

*   *   *

I sprinted for the holes.

My only hope was to get ahead and stay ahead. I hit the first hole at full speed, entering the building. When I looked back after ducking through the narrow gap in the wall, Brighton's eyes locked on mine.

I leaped over a pile of rubble and saw a stray piece of rebar jutting from the concrete. I yanked hard; the steel bar came loose. It felt good to have a weapon again. Any weapon. I crossed the room, and when I ducked through the next hole on the far side, I spun around.

I timed my throw carefully.

You hear stories of incredible feats of strength—people lifting cars off victims when their adrenaline is pumping. I flung the bar with all the force in my body, aiming for the narrow hole through which the man would come, and I saw Brighton's eyes go wide as the steel bar approached, saw the shock and pain—rebar striking center of mass—while he tried to twist away, but forward momentum carried him on, and his shoulder clipped the wall hard and he went down.

It was enough, and I was sprinting out of sight and around the bend, then around another bend, and another, losing myself in the maze of hallways. Ducking left, then right, utterly lost, until I came to a large loading bay.

A metal staircase ran upward along the wall, and I didn't hesitate. I took it two stairs at time, surging upward. Here the building was higher, and the staircase took me up by the rafters.

The catwalk shook with every footstep, so I stopped. I turned. Held my breath. I looked down at the main floor and waited, hoping that my pursuer would pass the staircase by. Hoping he would not look up.

Several seconds passed, and then Brighton entered the room below.

There was a moment of silence as he looked out across the empty loading bay. The stillness seemed to confuse him. He scanned the corners of the room. Slowly, he turned his face upward. He smiled.

“There you are,” he said.

I ran along the catwalk to the far door and crossed into another room. Here was a room of pipes and boilers, with huge empty vats and twisted metal railings.

At the far end of the small room was a doorway and another staircase—a way down, and I almost took it. But I knew I'd never outrun him. He'd catch me and kill me if I kept running. Instead, I moved to the shadows. When you have reached the limits of fight or flight, there is another, final option.
Hide.
I wedged myself behind one of the large vats—a huge steel tank that sat in the corner. One foot nudged into a large drainpipe that disappeared between two pieces of equipment.

I waited.

The sound of running. Heavy footfalls entered the room and crossed to the other side.

Keep going. Take the stairs.

At the far side, the footfalls stopped.

Please
. I closed my eyes. I cut myself off from myself. I wasn't there.

Seconds passed.

Then the footfalls continued on, going down the stairs, growing more distant.

Finally, I let out my breath, chest still hammering. Brighton had gone.

I waited to hear something. Anything. I wondered if Mercy had made it. I wondered if she'd gotten away.

There was another sound then, soft, from the other direction. I could almost imagine it hadn't happened. I began counting. The sound didn't come again.
Three, four, five, six …
After a ten count, I inched forward. I craned my neck, hoping for a better view of the room, but there was nothing. No one.

I inched farther. Dreading the rasp my knees made on the floor.

The room was dim and grimy; I couldn't see much from behind the vat in the corner—the only light diffuse, filtering in through the open doors and down through rust holes in the ceiling.

Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven …

I was still counting. I counted to sixty in my head before I moved, taking comfort in the familiar rhythms. Throwing numbers at the darkness, like when I was a child.

I crawled along the floor on my hands and knees, keeping close to the vat. My hip scraped something—a sound that seemed loud in my ears. When I chanced a look, my heart rose up in my throat.

Although Brighton was gone, a different man stood in the doorway.

A second familiar face.

*   *   *

Boaz's active eyes searched the shadows. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he said.

It was the same voice from that night in the restaurant. A voice like gravel.

I backed slowly around the vat until I couldn't see him anymore. Boaz's shoes crunched across the floor while I pressed as close to the wall as I could go, making myself small. It was only a matter of time, though. I realized that I might not leave this room alive.

“Eric,” his voice came. “I know you're in here.” The footsteps moved into the middle of the room.

I backed farther into the corner, and that's when I felt something catch my foot. The edge of the drainpipe, jutting from between a vat and a large pump housing. Two feet wide. The radius of a car tire. A
small
car tire, maybe less. In other, less ruinous times, it had been connected to the vat, draining whatever industrial processes were incubated there. But now the vat was out of position, empty and partially disassembled, and the pipe was exposed. I eyed it critically, doing the math. It would be a tight squeeze, but I could fit. I moved quickly and turned, almost going in head first, but the horror of that stopped me. The hellish blackness. Instead, I twisted myself into position and backed in feet first, making as little noise as possible. There was just enough room for me to shimmy inside. The pipe's interior was smooth and coated with muck, and I wondered what substance it had once carried. On second thought, it was probably better that I didn't know.

Boaz's footsteps came again.

Had he heard me?

I dared not move.

The steps came closer, moving around the vat.

“I watched you go up,” he said, “but you did not come down.”

I saw his legs, clad in slacks. The shoes were leather mountain boots. The legs moved closer, bringing him around the side of the vat and into the corner.

“By process of elimination, that means you are still here.”

He leaned into the corner, hand brushing past the drainpipe, inches from my face.

“Why are you hiding, little mouse? Your friend Stuart did not hide as you do.”

I felt myself go cold inside.
Stuart.
From where I crouched, Boaz was close enough to touch.

“He took his medicine bravely,” he said.

His hand swung past the opening to the pipe again. It was a large hand. Pale. Manicured. The hands of a businessman.

“You should have seen him on that pool table. All that blood.”

The pipe pressed in all around me.
Was he lying?
I felt sickness rise up. It was too much. First Satvik, now Stuart. I was responsible. Everything I touched, I destroyed. I held my breath again. I reached backward along my own body, feeling for my pocket, feeling for the cold metal.

The pale hand swung past and was gone. The legs stepped away. I could no longer see him.

My heart still hammered.

There were three seconds of total silence. The darkness of the pipe.

Then sudden movement, and Boaz's head loomed into view. “There you are!”

I stabbed him in the face with my shiv of folded steel.

 

42

He howled and unfurled from himself—a sound like a thousand wasp wings buzzing at once—my eyes sliding off what I couldn't understand.

I jerked backward, but his outstretched arm caught my hand, yanking me, so I twisted and stabbed with the shiv, and then the weapon was gone. Pulled from my grasp. I jerked backward, deeper into the pipe.

A clawing hand whipped past my face, brushing the hair off my forehead as I pushed myself backward with my elbows. Boaz screamed in rage and followed. He was larger than me but still not too large for the pipe—as I pushed backward as fast as I could, feeling the pipe slide beneath me; and it occurred to me that it would be a terrible way to die—stuck and suffocated around some bend in the pipe that I wouldn't be able to come back from. I tried to turn my head and look behind, but there was barely room to see around my body. Only blackness. Boaz pressed forward, getting his shoulders past the lip, and the light was eclipsed. He struggled and pressed, scrambling forward, his breath a ragged locomotive in the enclosed space. Abrupt silence, then the rasp of movement as he lowered himself onto his stomach—the inside of the pipe lit from behind. There was a momentary silver flicker in his eyes, like the eyes of a cat at night.