The Flicker Men (27 page)

When you are being approached by a knife-wielding stranger at 7:00 a.m. after being bound all night, there are worse things to hear spoken.

“Hold out your arms.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I sat up straight and did as she asked while she considered the task before her. She held the knife up to the tape, trying to visualize the angle least likely to accidentally slit my wrists.

“Don't thank me. He's letting me cut you loose mostly because I mentioned you'd need to use the bathroom. I told him I wasn't gonna hold it, so it'd be up to him.”

If it was in me to smile, I might have. “Good thinking,” I tried to say, but the words barely came out. My voice was getting worse, not better. I needed water. I must have been quite a sight, sick and bedraggled after a night in the box.

The knife pierced the tape, and she sawed slowly while I tried to pull my hands apart. I felt the cold steel brush my skin.

“Careful now,” she said. “No sudden movements. The only thread we have for stitches is your shoelaces.”

With a final jerk of the knife, the tape was severed and my arms came apart. My stiff joints took a moment to believe it. I still had tape attached to my forearms, but at least my shoulder sockets were mobile again. I stretched my arms slowly, raising them over my head.

“Sorry about having to tape you up,” she said. “Just a precaution. Come on, breakfast's for you, too.”

I followed her out of the trailer, stepping onto the filthy cement floor. Sunlight wasn't doing the place any favors. It was far more derelict than I'd realized last night. What I'd thought was some kind of rubble pile in the corner was actually a small bush, grown up through cracks in the floor. This place hadn't just been abandoned for years, I realized, but decades. None of the windows held glass, and the wind whistled through. Outside were more buildings, visible across a narrow divide that might have once been a causeway. Everywhere outside the windows, I saw long, low rectangular structures of steel and concrete. It looked like an old factory grounds or maybe an old army base of some kind.

I followed her to the fire and sat.

The breakfast was far better than the dinner. Eggs and bacon, cooked on an iron skillet over an open fire. It was like camping but under the confines of a tin roof that loomed high overhead. When I finished the eggs, I spoke. “The bathroom?”

“Show him,” Mercy said.

Hennig stood and led me through a narrow hole in the wall, past a strange assortment of old boilers and into a third room, vastly larger and partially open to the elements. Here, sunlight poured through skylight-sized holes in the roof, and entire trees grew in the middle of the floor. Pipes ran everywhere in various sizes and shapes. Some three feet across at their openings, sliced in half by long-forgotten welding torches. It didn't seem like the kind of thing you'd see in an old barracks, so my understanding of the place shifted. Definitely an industrial complex of some kind, though its original use was a mystery.

We followed a wall of crumbling red brick until we approached a door with a faded sign,
MEN
, stenciled across the warped wood, but Hennig passed that by and kept walking. “No water,” he said. “That'd get ripe pretty quick.”

We continued along the wall for another hundred feet until we came to an open doorway. I followed him outside, sun shining down, and on the other side of a neglected gravel roadway, a small building had completely caved in on itself. It had no roof at all, though three walls still stood.

“There,” he said. We stopped at a barrier of cement. “Number one on this side of the wall, number two the other.”

“Number one,” I said.

He gestured to the wall. “Well, have at it.”

I glanced around while I peed, trying to get a lay of the land. From where I stood, the buildings seemed to sprawl in every direction, variations on a theme. The place was a maze; I could see why they liked it. If it came to conflict, home court advantage would be important.

Three minutes later, we were back at the fire, where I found breakfast cleaned up. There were jugs of water and a scrub pad.

I saw guns on a table. A rifle. A shotgun. Two pistols. These people, whoever they were, suddenly seemed less homeless than paramilitary. Hennig picked up the last of the wood and placed it on the fire.

I fiddled with the tape still stuck to my arms, giving an experimental tug. The pain confirmed what I'd already suspected.

“Best to just do it quick,” Mercy said. “Like a Band-Aid.”

I yanked hard—a flash of pain. The tape came away, along with the hair on my forearm. I checked the skin. No blood at least. I yanked the other side free.

Hennig leaned against the table and stared at me while he picked his fingernails with his knife. He let the knife drop to the table, where it stuck straight up. “The tape may be off, but that doesn't mean you have the run of the place.”

I said nothing.

He looked at his watch. A diver's watch with a big dial face. Thick leather band to go with his thick wrist. “Vickers will be here soon.”

*   *   *

“Come on, let's find some more wood for the fire.” Mercy motioned to me to follow.

I followed her through the building. We walked outside by a different exit, and here the waist-high grass moved like waves. The breeze was picking up. Mercy led the way. I thought wood might be hard to find, but once we were some distance from the building, it was everywhere. Stunted, dried-up bushes, perfect for kindling. There were larger trees, too, still green, and Mercy pulled the branches down, snapping them off, stripping their leaves. Around the corner we found a pile of old planks.

“Here, help me break this.”

She lay the board across a nearby cinder block. “You're heavier,” she said, motioning at the board. I stepped onto the wood, and it broke with a loud crack. She grabbed the longer piece.

“Again,” she said. So I did.

I thought about running.

I might have been faster than her. I outweighed her by sixty pounds, so I was probably stronger. Other than the knife, she didn't seem to be armed. A gun was hard to conceal without a bulge of some kind, but it wasn't impossible. She could have had a derringer strapped to her calf beneath her loose jeans. I let my eyes wander over the surrounding landscape. I saw tall, swaying grass and bushes and the upward slope of a hill, leading up into trees. Bombed-out buildings all around. In the distance, at the top of the hill, I saw a chain-link fence that might have once been topped with barbed wire but now only trailed dangling crimson strands—either snipped intentionally long ago or rusted through and fallen. Only the brackets at the top of the fence stood as a reminder that the protective walls of the citadel had once had teeth. I could make it to the fence, and then up and over, and she'd likely never catch me. Not unless she was fast. Not unless she was armed. Not unless she was willing to kill me.

Her shouts might rouse her friend, I knew, but he was still thirty yards away, inside a building, back at the dying fire. So I'd have a head start.

She looked at me as if she knew what I was thinking.

“A mile of woods that way,” she said. She pointed to the fence. “A big hill and a drop, and then you'd come out on the tide flats. If the tide is in, you'd hit the canal and cold water. Maybe some current—enough to suck you out to sea—or maybe not. If you're lucky, and the tide isn't in, you'd hit a mudflat, three quarters of a mile—a dangerous crossing but doable—and then beyond that a rise and woods and then a town at the top. Roads. A dock. Civilization.”

It wasn't a dare. Not even that.

Because the math had an escapable calculus. If I did get free from them, then what?

Sailors have died abandoning ships they should have stayed on.

She looked at me. “So?”

I gave a last, lingering look at the fence and the woods. “Not today,” I said.

*   *   *

We gathered wood until our arms were full, and then we started back. She took a different path through the ruins. “This place used to be a smeltery,” she said. “God knows how long ago. Then it was a gasworks for three decades. Then a storage lot for ingots. Then empty. Maybe someday it'll be bulldozed and turned into condos. It's amazing how something can be built for one purpose and then transform into something else.” We ducked as we passed through another hole in the wall. This building was smaller but empty as the rest.

“Did you guys put these holes in?”

“Tactical retreat is what Hennig calls it. The holes give us the short path if we need it. As long as we stay out of the line of sight, then whatever's following might miss the holes and have to take the long way around.”

“And if you can't stay out of sight?”

“Then we better be faster.”

“Faster than what, exactly?”

“Same thing everyone needs to be faster than,” she said. “What's coming for you.”

We walked across a pile of corrugated steel roofing that clattered under our feet. I lost my balance on the slick tin but caught myself.

“We call these places hides,” she said. “This one is better than most. Private and out of the way. The cops patrol the exterior sometimes, but they never come inside. Keeping the bums and vagrants away is the hardest part. They wander in. Hennig makes them go away.”

“I bet he does.”

“Not that kind of away. Nothing permanent. He's not a bad guy.”

“Easy for you to say. You didn't get punched in the face.”

She shook her head. “You don't even understand what you don't understand.”

“Then enlighten me.” My arms had begun to ache from carrying the wood.

“That'll happen soon enough.”

Something about the way she said it made me uneasy. I took a guess. “Vickers,” I said. “When?”

“Oh, Vickers is already here.” She stopped.

We were outside the building where we'd spent the night. I realized then what the walk might have been about, besides the wood. If Vickers had second thoughts about what to do with me, then they'd be inside waiting. No need to discuss it with me standing there.

Mercy cocked her head toward the hole in the wall. “After you,” she said.

Either way, I didn't have much choice. I walked toward the hole, bent, and stepped through to the other side. She followed close behind. Maybe too close.

My vision took a moment to adjust.

We were in at the edge of the encampment. I saw the trailer and the fire. I looked for Hennig, but he was nowhere to be seen. Hiding behind the cargo hold, waiting to pounce? Or sent away?

I stepped farther in. The camp was deserted.

But I didn't have to wait long.

A moment later, I heard voices approaching from the other room. Hennig came through the doorway first, followed by Vickers. Or who I assumed must have been Vickers.

She was still partially in shadow. Tall, with short brown hair. She wore dark slacks, and a long sleeve button-up. White collar. Gold bracelet on her left wrist. By her clothes, she might have just stepped out of a boardroom somewhere or been impaneled on a grand jury. Whoever she was, she wasn't dressed like a person hiding in the woods.

Because there was nothing else for it, I walked around to the other side of the fire and dumped my cache of wood on the floor. The stranger glanced over at me as she approached the fire, taking note of my presence for the first time. Her pale green eyes lifted to my face.

And it was then that I recognized her.

It was the woman from Brighton's penthouse.

Confused, I glanced at Mercy. But she offered no explanation.

The new woman appraised me, face expressionless. She could have been angry, or disappointed, or just evaluating.

Since I wasn't sure what to say, I said nothing. Just let her eyes move over me while she worked over whatever decision she was coming to. Or maybe she'd made the decision already, and she was just coming around to the way she'd let me know. Mercy walked around the fire and sat at the open mouth of the trailer.

“We were never formally introduced,” the woman said. She stuck out her hand. “My name is Vickers.” I took a step forward and shook. The hand was delicate, long-fingered.

“Eric Argus,” I said.

Vickers turned toward Mercy. “Hennig didn't do that to his face, did he?”

“Some of it,” she said.

Vickers looked at me. “Walk with me,” she said. “We have a lot to discuss.”

 

36

“A long time ago, there was a woman who crunched corporate budgets and filled in spreadsheets and made careful, prudent assessments of risk versus gain; then something terrible happened.”

“And what was that?” I asked. We were outside the building, walking an old roadway. Here tire tracks beat twin paths through the tall grass that carpeted the landscape.

“She found that all her assessments were wrong. The world was more dangerous than she'd realized.”

We came to a particularly deep rut in our path and avoided it by stepping over the strip of grass and into the other track. Above us, the sun angled down through great upwellings of white, cauliflorous cloud. A postcard day. “Accurate assessments can only be made when one has all the information,” she continued.

“And you lacked that information, is that where this is going?”

“We all lack it to some extent. I've always been a cautious person, but this world has turned me into something I never thought I'd be.”

“And what's that?”

“A gambler.”

“So that's why I'm here,” I said. “A gamble.”

She nodded. “In some ways.” She opened her suit jacket while we walked, and she pulled out two glossy four-by-six photos. She handed them to me. “I know you've met Brighton, but is there a second man in this photo who looks familiar?”

I recognized him immediately. “Boaz,” I said.