Out of the Black (5 page)

"Don't go!" she shouted, feeling the emptiness around them both.

Lower, slower- almost out of sight, the boy noticed something below and turned to look. When he turned back to her, his face was alive with excitement. His crutches were nowhere to be seen now and he'd lost the thick glasses. He looked somehow bigger, stronger, older- more familiar. He cupped his hands and shouted to her, but she could only hear the sound of rushing water. He gestured with enthusiasm toward something in the darkness beneath him.

Then a strange inversion happened. Her perspective shifted and he was ascending as she fell upside down toward an uncertain end. The darkness he approached was now the bright morning sky; the murk that engulfed him became a bright enfolding haze. The light of the surface that Anne approached was now harsh, like a distant shiver of lightning and fire. As the boy moved further into the light, she thought she glimpsed two men in white clothes reaching out to embrace him. Then all she saw was the blackness around her as she broke through the surface and into the rain.

"Don't... go." She croaked, aloud this time, mouth full of rainwater. She lifted her head and opened her eyes onto a scene that cemented her grim memories. Reflections of her bloodshot eyes and puffy face filled her vision. Her image rippled as raindrops disturbed the dirty puddle.

Her head was the first part of her body to register with her complaints department. Behind that splitting pain was a long line of other aches and agonies jostling for their turn. They washed over and through her... wet blackness.

Her eyes opened again and were reflected back pink tinged and dark in the rain-rippled water. What was she lying on? Memory paralyzed her. Fear took her away.

"Run!" Like a carelessly encountered landmine, the force of the word blew her up and out of the blackness. Her eyes snapped open, cramping and unresponsive arms pushed her up. Terror filled her mind, stars filled her head- and he again filled her vision. Not strong him- broken him. Not deadly him- innocent him, dead him. As she levered herself onto her hands, his arm fell slack from behind her neck and landed with a wet slap on the sidewalk.

She knew he was dead. His face held none of the conviction, strength or intelligence that were so evident before.

"Run!" Her vision shimmered with the resonance of the word, her bones vibrated with it. Terror was cold black milk filling her heart, chilling her toward inaction, but she knew that inaction would be death for her, though she f tdn't remember why.

She attempted to surge to her feet, but ended up going over backwards... surging to her butt instead, hands slapping heavily on the wet pavement. Desperate, she scrabbled away backwards on hands and feet.

He didn't move: legs still twisted, mouth again slack, lifeless eyes half-lidded. The rain was lighter now, but it had removed much of the blood from his skin, leaving a red-black dissolute bloom on the pavement around the corpse.

The glass that littered the ground cut into her palms, but fear wouldn't let her stop her desperate flight. At last her shaky right arm gave way and she fell on her back. Her neck flared with pain and her head connected with the pavement. Her vision narrowed as if she was looking through a short, dark tunnel. Half conscious, she blinked up into the sprinkle of falling rain.

The pain was exquisite, but one thought forced it aside:
She couldn't see him
. She knew he was dead, but she had known that once before. She imagined his eyes opening again, a wicked smile stretching over curved teeth, limbs like bags of shattered bones reaching for her. She saw innocent eyes, soft and apologetic.

"Run!" The voice seemed to come from deep beneath her, rumbling into her bones through the ground. The voice was a chorus of two speakers: young and old, sweet and hard, tender and terrible, imploring and imperative.

Before she could regain the air knocked out of her by her short fall, she was over on her stomach and pushing up. And there it was, right before her, sticking out of the cracked sidewalk like a severe steel flower. Though it was immediately clear what it was, she spent a few seconds staring as her mind refused to accept this, the evening's newest impossibility. It was a sword, buried nearly to the hilt in the sidewalk. The hilt was a marvel of ergonomic curves that seemed to beg for her hand, the crossbar was angled slightly forward; it's ends seeming to reach for the ground. The small section of exposed blade shimmered, even in the darkness of the stormy street. Even in the chaos of her fear, this implement of death spoke an odd peace to her. Staring into its elegance, she felt her heart pulled to a place of peace and discipline, from the present darkness back into a time of light, reason and learning. It occurred to her that if she could pull it from the concrete, she might be the next king of England.

Of course, the last thing she wanted to do right now was to have another strange experience. Fear reasserted itself and she pressed up from the ground. She tried to run before her legs were fully beneath her and fell painfully again; her hands, elbows, belly, then face plowing to the pavement like a foundering dirigible. Oh the humanity, she thought hazily as she mostly choked the scream of pain, which came out as a thin, pathetic sound. The rain fell on her back and splashed off the street around her as she raised herself to hands and knees and began a frantic crawl.

After another two meters of desperate hand and knee damage, she pulled her knees up under her and made a successful lurch to her feet. She stumbled forward, swinging her arms stiffly to counterbalance her shifting weight. She risked a glance behind her and saw him lying there still, dead as ever- well, more dead than before- really dead? He looked small, helpless and horribly broken, but he'd looked like that before.

She realized that she was still making the plaintive "ohhohhh" sound that she'd started the second time she fell. She didn't try to stop it. Instead she ran, embracing its shallow comfort, letting it elongate into sobs which too soon turn into wracking gasps of physical and emotional overexertion. She had to stop. She rumbled to a halt at the near side of an intersection. Panting, she leaned against the rough stone of a building, trying to regain her breath. When she closed her eyes, his face filled her vision and waves of vertigo crashed around. Her eyes jerked open- she'd almost gone out again. Around her, phantoms of her fear filled the night air, skulking in the shadows, lingering at the edges of the light's influence.

She glanced back to the fallen man to gauge her progress: she'd gone a block.

One stinking block? She felt like she was going to have some kind of exercise-related rupture and she had only run one block; so much for her track and field aspirations. The occasional bark of hysterical laughter mixed with her panting and sobbing.

Behind her, not far from the crumpled car and the crumpled man, a door opened. Light flooded out into the street and a dark shadow fell across the sidewalk. She cut her lip on a piece of glass embedded in her palm as she pressed it over her mouth to squelch her desperate sounds. She stumbled around the corner and peered cautiously back as a well-dressed man staggered out the door.

He looked normal enough, no horns or tail or flaming eyes. His clothes made Anne think of an investment banker or some other near-north-side success story. He was maybe fifty and bald with a close-cropped fringe of metallic gray hair. He carried an umbrella in his right hand, which he deployed as he stepped from the shelter of the building. His left hand was held against his body as if he'd hurt the arm in a recent fall.

He scanned the street, looking for something- maybe he had heard the commotion outside and came to investigate. Maybe he was looking for witnesses- maybe he was looking for her. Time to go. She withdrew behind the corner and made her best speed away. She didn't see the man approach the crumpled car. She didn't see the umbrella fall to the street as the man fell to his knees beside the corpse, heedless of the rain and broken glass.

As she approached the next intersection, she looked back, terrified of pursuit. She wasn't sure, but she thought she saw a flicker of light, like a softer and more localized cousin of lightening. It came from around the corner where she had been standing. It was subtle, and on any other day she might have been able to convince herself that it was her imagination.

On any other day she wouldn't have turned and ran flat out.

Half a block later, distant but plain, she heard a piercing cry. A man screamed, long and desolate. She wondered if she had screamed when the dead man ripped into her neck. She definitely wanted to now.

Ten minutes later she approached Union Station. She became acutely aware that she was a conspicuous mess. She always felt conspicuous- ugly, fat, the clueless hairstyle- but this was different. Not only was she gone-swimming-wet, but she had several small cuts on her face and larger ones on her hands. Her pants were ripped and bloody at the knees, but that was nothing compared to the dark blood stains that went from her neck across most of her light blue sweater.

During her flight, she had considered calling the police several times. If anyone needed help, she did, but there was an unreasoning fear to deal with. Some things you just don't want to get involved with, even if you already are. To call the police would be to admit that it had happened- it would be like asking to be in on the rest of the story. She wanted out. Like always, she wanted to disappear almost s desperately as she wanted to be found.

She pushed through the revolving doors and into the station. Thankfully, there weren't many people in sight due to the pre-dawn hour. Before long, the station would be bustling with morning commuters. But for now there would be only a few security guards and the homeless trying to escape the rain.

She pushed her way through the door. Head down, she headed directly to the washroom. She still had ten minutes before her train and she was hoping to at least partially compose herself before the ride home.

"Good morning!" a hard voice said from near her left shoulder.

She had a hard time admitting this later, but she freaked all the way out- strangled yelp, arms jerking up, stumbling a few steps away, head turned away and arms flailing to keep him off of her- all the way out.

"Cool out lady! Whoa!" The unseen voice still sounded hard, but was tempered with something between pity and professionalism. His feet appeared in her peripheral vision as he stepped closer. "It's okay, but you can't stay here if you don't have a ticket."

Aw crap. She looked up from beneath her upraised arms and saw his legs, his jacket, his badge, and then finally the clean lines of his concerned face.

She swallowed hard. "Sorry... whoo... way too much coffee." She said shakily "You kinda freaked me out."

"That was kinda?" He said, somewhat relieved that he probably wouldn't have to call for backup.

"Sorry, it's been one of those nights. Fell down twice while I was running to get out of the rain." She gave him an embarrassed smile. Both deceptive and true, she was impressed with herself.

"Sure." He stared at her clothes with clear doubt.

"Really." She said, fishing for her Uni. She finally fumbled it out, and sent him her monthly train pass and ID. He checked his tablet and nodded. "Sorry to bother you then. I thought..." he paused.

"What vagrant could afford this much dessert?" She made an expansive gesture bracketing her thighs. It caught him off guard and he smiled.

"Do you need help?" He was looking at her neck, uh oh. "I've got a first aid kit in the..."

"I'm fine... just going to check out the cuts in the bathroom, then head home for a long bath and some serious sleep."

He nodded thoughtfully before pointing a stern finger at her. "Decaf."

"Yes sir." She hurried toward the bathroom.

***

Ping sat in the silence of his car, staring at the professor's decrypt-proof tablet, trying to make sense of this new development.

By law all electronic data had to be decryptable. Even military and governmental computers had to yield their data to an appropriately authorized warrant key. Of course, it took a federal court or an act of congress to issue a warrant key for those systems.

The encryption was nearly perfect too. Partly because the technology was nearly unbreakable, but mostly because the best defense is a good offense: attempting to crack a computer's encryption was an offense that led to jail time even for minors.

Wys were issued carefully and infrequently, and oversight of the issuing judges was strict. Abuses of the warrant system were rare, and dealt with harshly. When a warrant key was issued, it was tuned to a specific computer. When the key was used, the decrypted data would be copied aside and the key would expire.

That was how it was supposed to work. A few mob accountants might have computers with non-compliant encryption, but usually not history professors. Why would a college professor risk serious jail time just to hide his data? Not usually the kind of thing you do to protect ungraded papers or pre-publication research on the Boston Tea Party.

Ping packaged a copy of Dr. Lutine's decrypt-resistant data in a secure message and sent it to the FBI for cracking. He didn't have much hope of getting the data back in less than a month, if ever. Non-standard encryption was subtle, and often reactive. Even the Feds had a less than fifty percent recovery rate.

He slipped the Doctor's tablet back into its evidence bag and reached for the driver's tablet. As he fished in the plastic evidence bag, his hand closed on the flashlight/glasses case first. He pulled it out, mildly curious. It felt comfortable in his hand, like it had been made just for him... so not a glasses case. On closer inspection, he found an activating stud in a recess near his thumb on the grip.

He pressed it, but heard only a small electronic lock rejection tone. A locked flashlight?

Ping turned it over in his hands. Other than the thumb stud and the comfortable grip, there was no further hint of its purpose. Maybe it was some kind of stun gun, but it didn't look like anything he had seen before. There were no electrodes on the end, nor any visible holes for projectiles. The business end of the assumed gun was smooth and featureless. On the other end, there was some kind of etched glyph.