The Flicker Men (26 page)

She turned and moved toward me. “Come here,” she said, grabbing hold of the back of my neck. I let myself be pulled forward. The bag descended over my face.

“Why bother?” The scarred man said.

Less likely to kill you than the other guys.

“Just in case,” she said.

“In case what?” he said. “You think he's walking away from all this?”

The bag was scratchy and dark, some kind of woven cloth. From the front seat, the driver's voice came softly. “There ain't no walking away.”

*   *   *

When we arrived at our destination, I heard the doors open. I felt my arm being pulled, so I swung my feet out and stood. I let myself be pulled along.

“Watch your step.”

It was night. I couldn't see, but I could tell by the air and the sounds of crickets in the distance.

The ground under my feet changed from soft earth to something harder. We were inside. Our footsteps made slight echoes as we walked. Wherever we were, the room was big, I decided.
An airport hangar? Was I about to be whisked away to another location?

After walking for a few minutes, the voice came again. “Another step.”

I lifted my leg higher, and there was a six-inch rise. Now the sound was different. The echo gone. Rough hands jerked my shoulders around.

“Sit.”

I reached behind me, feeling the cool wood of a chair. I sat. There were murmurs and the shuffle of feet. I heard talking but couldn't make out what was said.

Footsteps circled. Heavy. They stopped.

“Search him.”

Hands groped at my body. My pockets, my legs, my crotch. They took my phone but left my wallet.

“No weapons.”

The bag was pulled off my head. A single mechanic's light hung from a hook in the corner of the room, blinding me. We were in an old warehouse of some kind. No, an old factory, I decided. The room was a manager's office—a large window of mesh-reinforced safety glass looked out on a continent of cement flooring—the dimensions like an artist's study of perspective. The glass was spidered, held together by wire. There was no door. The far side of the building was corrugated steel, bowed and rusty. The whole place looked as if it had been abandoned years ago and left to rot.

The man and woman now stood in front of me.

“He's younger than I expected,” the scarred man said.

I glanced up. Large. Six foot two by the look of him. His scars and unruly beard made him look like a pirate who'd been too long out at sea. Not the pirates of cartoons and summer comedies. Instead, the pirates who followed ships into international waters, boarded them at night, and killed everyone aboard who didn't seem likely to draw a ransom.

“Where am I?” I asked.

Without a word, the scarred man swung a huge fist into the side of my head. I went down hard, chair and all. The world faded and then came back.

“Stop!” the woman snapped. The man's arm was pulled back for another blow, fist cocked near his right shoulder. She pushed him hard in the chest. “Enough.”

The push seemed to snap him out of his anger, and he smiled at the woman. He held up his hands, palms out. “Fine, fine,” he said

His smile faded when he looked down at me. He lowered into a crouch, one elbow on his knee.

The woman tried to pull him back to his feet, but he shook her off with a jerk of his arm. “I'm not going to hurt him,” he said. His eyes turned back toward me. “But he needs to know his place here.”

His eyes crawled over me.

“I could say I hit you for speaking out of turn, but it wouldn't be true. The truth is, I thought I should set things straight here at the beginning.” He bent closer, speaking right into the side of my face. “I don't like all the trouble you've caused. You're going to do what we say, or we're going to kill you, do you understand?”

“Enough,” the woman said again.

“No, I want him to answer.” His eyes bore into me. “Do you understand?”

I pulled myself up to an elbow.

I looked around for something to grab. Anything. Something to hit him with. My ears were still ringing. My nose throbbed in pain. I felt the chair, and my fingers curled around one wooden leg.

“Stop,” the woman said. She had seen my hand on the wood.

She turned toward the man and reached behind her back, and that's when I saw the knife. Her damaged fingers curled around the handle.

“I said,
stop.
” And this time her voice was different. Low and slow and deadly. Almost quiet. They were words said in a way that meant there would be no more words.

He turned to look at her. He seemed to consider her stance, turned sideways to him, one hand out of sight.

“We'll let Vickers decide,” he said.

He turned back toward me. “Stand up.”

I did my best to do as he instructed, but my head still wasn't right. My balance was shit, but I managed to gain my feet.

The woman lifted the chair from the floor and righted it.

“Sit down,” she said.

I sank onto the chair. The scarred man walked around me.

“There will be people looking for me,” I said.

“More than you know. They're probably watching your motel as we speak.”

Motel
. It meant they knew where I lived.

“Where do you think you'd be right now if we hadn't come along?” He asked.

He seemed to expect an answer. “Dead probably,” I said.

“That's right. So whatever else happens, we don't owe you anything. Even life. Do you understand?”

“Who are you?”

“Oh,” he said softly. “That's really gonna depend.”

 

34

Dinner was a mix of beans and bread. Night had fallen, and we sat around a small fire in another, deeper part of the warehouse, beneath a high ceiling, among a confusion of splintered crates that had been piled into a barricade against the greater expanse of the room. One wall of our makeshift encampment was an old semitrailer, missing the wheels; another wall was lost in the shadows. They had pulled the panel truck around to the back of the structure and thrown a tarp over it.

Above our heads sprawled vast leagues of sheet metal and steel I beams, below which hung sporadic, empty trays that might have once held fluorescent bulbs but now held only empty air. Occasional gusts of wind entered the room through distant gaps in the walls, fanning the flames of the campfire. I listened carefully and could hear only crickets and the sound of spoons on plates. No highway noise. No sounds of the city. Wherever we were, we were out in the boonies.

I watched them while they shoveled food into their mouths. First the woman, thin and anxious. Her eyes active. She ate quickly, like she was starving, but it was more than hunger that drove her—like food was an unwelcome diversion of her attention. The man who'd hit me ate slower, eyes focused on his plate. The woman called him Hennig. A fitting enough name for a pirate, I decided. He took his meal in big bites, chewing slowly.
Hennig the half-ear
, I thought to myself. When the fire began to dim, he rose and grabbed several large scraps of wood from a nearby stockpile to feed the flames. He didn't look at me. Didn't speak. He was already finished with his meal, and had now turned his attention to his handgun. The air smelled of beans, wood smoke, and gun oil. He cleaned the weapon while I stared into the fire.

*   *   *

They bound my wrists with duct tape—a rhythmic
pull, wrap, pull, wrap
, as the tape wound up and over and around. My injured hand throbbed. The hair on my arms would be a lost cause, I knew, when that tape came off.
If
that tape came off. There was always a chance I'd die with it on. A possibility that I overheard discussed after they taped my feet and carried me across the room to the broken-down trailer. With no arms to catch my fall, I hit my head on the steel and cried out.

“Quiet,” Hennig said. “Or we'll tape your mouth next.”

His unpredictability I feared. But it was a reasoned fear. One I could control. When he mentioned taping my mouth shut, there was nothing reasoned about it. The thought of it made my arms tremble—the shakes always just under the surface. I thought about puking in the morning, tape still on my mouth, gagging and drowning on my own vomit.

I was silent as vacuum.

*   *   *

They took shifts over the next few hours, walking the grounds.

From my position against the trailer, I watched them come and go, until they both sat by the fire.

When the fire had nearly burned itself out, the woman rose and spoke to Hennig, who was cleaning his gun again. Or a different gun. She leaned close, speaking into his missing chunk of ear. In the fire's glow, I saw Hennig's eyes move to me. They seemed to argue, and then Hennig nodded.

He crossed the room toward me, while she stood and watched.

There was a knife in his hand. It was a hunter's knife, gleaming orange in the last embers of the fire. It was a wicked piece of steel, curved slightly, tapering to a point. I imagined the blade sliding neatly between my ribs, slicing skin and muscle and pleura, digging for my heart.

Hennig didn't speak. He crouched next to me. He was quick about it. There was a jerk and then a quick
snit
sound, and my ankles pulled free.

“Stand,” he said. “I'm not dragging you.”

I used my elbows to roll myself onto my side, trying to get my feet under me. A strong arm yanked at my bicep, pulling me upward, and I was on my feet again. I held my bound wrists out to him, but he shook his head.

“That tape stays on,” he said. He pointed inside the trailer. “You sleep there. I want you against the far back wall of the box.” He motioned with his head toward where the woman sat. “She's going to sleep at the front of the box, meaning you can't get out without stepping over her. You're her problem, do you understand?”

I nodded again.

“I'm sleeping out here.” He gestured toward to the floor around the fire. “Even if you get by her, you can't get out of this room without stepping over me.” He leaned forward. “Don't become my problem tonight.”

He motioned me toward the steel box, and I retreated inside. It was the kind of box you saw on highways, pulled behind semis. It was thirty feet long, eight feet wide, nine feet tall. A hundred thousand Pok
é
mon dolls might have fit inside. Or one luxury living-room set, shipped special, all the way to Malibu. Tonight it would be my bed. Near the back, where there was no ventilation or light or heat.

I walked to where the blackness was absolute. I felt the back wall with my hands then sat. Although the walls of the box were steel, the floor was lined with wood and mushy with rot. I stretched my legs and looked out toward the front, and it was like sitting in the small end of a telescope, watching the world from a little spot of darkness.

A few minutes later, the woman gestured for me to come closer. I ventured out of the box again, and she handed me a blanket. It was thick and warm and didn't smell too bad.

“The box is just for tonight,” she said. “Vickers will be here tomorrow.”

“This Vickers is in charge?”

“You could say that.”

“You were the one who saved me at the lab. You pulled me away from the fire.”

“The fire.” She nodded. Her dirty blonde hair swayed. “Not our handiwork.”

“Brighton's?”

“He was sending a message.”

“Hell of a message.”

She smiled. “You should have run that night and not come back. You might have had a chance.”

“So who is he?”

“Not who he seems,” she said. She was silent for a moment. “His kind lives by hiding.”

“Funny, he doesn't seem the hiding type to me.”

She shook her head. “He's hiding in the same place that his kind have always hidden. In plain sight.”

This seemed fitting to me. Like the way you can know a particle's location or its velocity. Never both. The universe is built of secret knowledge.

“And what is your name?” I asked.

She was turned away from the fire, lost in shadow, so I couldn't read her expression. “That's the last thing you need to be worry about.” She went silent again after that, and I began to think that she wasn't going to say more. But whatever inner argument she waged blew itself out. “Mercy,” she said. “You can call me Mercy.”

 

35

In the morning, the sound of voices woke me. Then a distant sizzling. I opened my eyes, and light streamed through a thousand holes in the roof. They might have been bullet holes. Or rust holes. In a rainstorm, this place would leak like a screen door.

I sat up. At the front of the trailer, the blanket was folded into a neat square. Mercy was already gone, talking with Hennig. I could hear them but not see them—voices drifting from outside the box.

I summoned the will to move and rose to lean against the steel. My shoulders screamed in pain, but I didn't let myself make a sound.

Mercy returned. She eyed me from around the corner. “You're up. How are you feeling?”

Alive
, I could have said. My stomach twisted but not from hunger. For three seconds I thought I'd puke, and then I did puke, bringing up bile and acid until my eyes stung and my nose throbbed. I tried to breathe through my nose, but it was still caked with blood. I felt moisture on my hand as I propped myself up.

“You okay?”

I let her ask twice before the nausea passed and I felt I could speak.

“Fine,” I said. Not yet trusting myself to longer conversation.

“You sick? Got the flu or something?”

“No,” I said, voice burned and awful. “Morning's are hardest.”

She approached, careful to step around the vomit, serrated steak knife in hand. “The rest of this tape can go,” she said.