Flight of Shadows: A Novel Read online

Another smile. Control and pleasure. He gestured at a shiny black globe on a pole at the edge of the roof. “I have an arrangement with security. Surveillance cameras. Everywhere. Right now, recording the two of us. Something I’ll watch again and again when I have finished with you.”

  When I have finished with you.

  As Everett sipped at his wine and watched over the edge of his glass for her reaction, there was a narrowing of his eyes, obvious even in the last light of dusk, perhaps to see if she understood the implied threat.

  “Where do you live?” he said. “Where do you go after you leave this roof and walk out the front lobby? What’s your name? What do you dream of? I want to know everything about you. I want to possess you.”

  A broader smile. “What will I find when we unwrap the loose clothing that you wear like a cloak? I think that’s what I want to know most. All those hours watching you on camera as you clean rooms, wondering what you hide.”

  Everett savored another sip of wine. “We have all night, you know.”

  Caitlyn stepped sideways, to go around him. He stepped sideways too, chuckling.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “The door is locked. There is no way back into the building without the key in my pocket. I have the leisure to indulge in my desires. Here. Now.”

  “Security,” she said, pointing to the surveillance cameras. “Someone will know.”

  “You truly don’t understand. That’s part of what will make this satisfying. Especially after all these weeks of watching you, waiting for this. I own those cameras. After, there will be many, many more who will enjoy watching what I do to you.”

  Everett shook his head. “Don’t you realize how special you are? For those of us with jaded tastes, the prospect of degradation with someone as freakish as you must be shared.”

  Freakish. Her recoil must have been obvious.

  “When you work,” he said, “there are times your clothing clings tight to your back. It must be hideous, what you so carefully hide. Most women are plastic perfection. To unveil you will be extraordinary…”

  More wine before he continued. “In a way, I’m a director. From hours and hours of surveillance film in various places of the hotel, I’ve put together a montage of your life as a maid. Your innocence and unawareness is so mundane that it cannot help but build an appetite for how it will end. I’ve had practice, of course. You’re not the first. But I think you’ll be the most delightful. None of the others in my films have been freaks.”

  His turn to take a step. Toward her. “It will be nicer if you don’t fight. Try to find enjoyment in this. Think of yourself as a star, about to debut.”

  She backed away. Until the abutment of the roof’s edge pressed against her. With a forty-story drop to the streets that she hated.

  “Don’t spoil this,” he said. “Don’t jump. If you are compliant enough, this won’t end the way it did with the others. I’ll let you live. You’re special enough, and I have a suite in the hotel to keep you in. Who knows? Perhaps you will learn to look forward to nights on the rooftop with me.”

  She couldn’t jump. Not with him so close.

  Everett was on her with a swiftness that made her gasp, dropping the wine bottle and glass, showering her with shards. Then wrenching her away from the edge, pulling at her cloak, fumbling at the horrible hunch on her back.

  Caitlyn hated the Outside. She hated the danger it seemed to hold for her. She hated that every morning she had to find a way to force herself to walk along the streets, ever watchful that someone might step out from the crowd. She hated the sensation of being pursued, although she told herself again and again that Mason Lee, the bounty hunter who had forced her out of Appalachia, was well behind her, left for dead. She hated that every morning as she dressed, she needed to strap a small, sharp knife inside a sheath at the back of a belt around her waist.

  Her premonition had been correct, however. A hunter had shown up with the unexpectedness she’d dreaded. But not the hunter she’d expected. Still, there was only one way to respond.

  Pinned by his arms, she was still able to reach behind and pull the knife from its sheath.

  He was grunting in unnatural passion, lost in his hunger, arms pinning her, hands pulling at the terrible hunch on her back. His fingers found the skintight black microfabric and began to spread open the gap at the back. Pressed against him, with the wine on his hot breath washing over her, all she could manage was a small upward thrust with the knife.

  Everett screamed, fell backward.

  It was dark now. It took him several moments to realize what had happened. She watched him reach down with his hands and feel the hilt of the knife.

  He struggled to sit up.

  “You freak,” he said.

  His calmness was unnerving. He pulled out a cell from one pocket and snapped it open, eyes on her as he spoke. “Send someone up. She had a knife.”

  Pause. “I know because it’s in me.”

  Another pause. “Of course I know the bleeding will be worse if I pull it out. Get someone here quickly. Take care of me first. Then her. Like the others. Make her disappear.”

  He snapped the phone shut. In the darkness, she imagined she could feel his glare. “Freak. It didn’t have to be this way.”

  More fumbling at his pocket. “You can’t see this, but it’s the key to the door.”

  Sudden movement of his arm. A small tinkling sound farther away. He’d thrown it into the dark.

  “No escape now,” Everett said with a harsh laugh interrupted by a groan. When it passed, he said, “You’ve probably got enough time to beg me not to have you killed. At least let me enjoy that.”

  Caitlyn adjusted her cloak so that it covered her body again, hanging from where it was secured around her neck. She reached beneath the cloak and pulled an outer layer of microfabric downward, rolling it until it reached her waist so that the hunch of her back was now exposed. The inner layer was skintight, and with the breeze, it felt like her upper body was naked beneath the cloak. Then she moved to him and squatted.

  “Back off,” he said. “Don’t make it worse on yourself. Freak.”

  She reached for him. He tried to push her arms away, but she was far, far stronger than she looked.

  “I want my knife back,” she said. And pulled it loose.

  Then she whirled away. To the edge of the roof.

  Freak.

  She let the gusting wind calm her. The door behind her opened. Shouts. Two men. Maybe three. She didn’t look back.

  She spread her wings beneath the cloak. Pushed off the ledge into the open sky.

  And flew.

  TWO

  At the sound of voices in the moist, cool air, Mason Lee stopped pacing on the rocky ground at the bottom of the underground waterfall. Because of the sheer blackness of the interior of the cave, Mason Lee had long ago lost any rational ability to sense the movement of time. He could only guess by his count of rat tails that it had been nearly six weeks since he had heard any voice but his own, an isolation so long that his right arm, broken and put into a cast in the days before entering the cave, had fully healed and he’d been able to strip the cast away.

  Mason should have died from dehydration, far above on one of the ledges of the giant shaft above him and the river.

  A stab of brightness in his right eye had saved his life. He’d been fading in and out of consciousness on a stone ledge near the top of the water, mouth torn and bloody from chewing on rope, delirious with thirst, maddened by the sound of water that was so close, yet so far, and sent even closer to absolute insanity by his fear of the dark.

  The intensity of the sudden pain in his eye had clarified his conscious thoughts, and in that instant he realized that one of the rats he’d listlessly allowed to explore his body and lick at the blood on his mouth had bitten into the softness of his eye. Reflexes that made Mason such a good hunter served him, weak as he was, and he’d snatched the rat off his face and, in rage, snapped its head off with his ow
n teeth.

  Without thinking about it, he’d sucked greedily at the copper of the rat’s blood. Instead of flinging the rat’s body into the giant shaft that the waterfall had carved downward in the cave throughout millennia, Mason held on to the rat, feeling power return to his body as its warm liquid renewed him.

  Complete insanity, brought on by the darkness, had retreated at the stimuli of the rat’s actions and his own. Rational thought began again, and Mason’s cunning had returned.

  The presence of rats told him that he wasn’t as completely buried inside the mountain as he had feared. Somehow, somewhere, they were able to enter and exit at will. The rats, then, gave him hope.

  And nourishment.

  Mason didn’t eat the entire body of that first rat, but saved enough as bait to catch another. And, when needed, another. He saved the tails, guessing that he was eating one rat every day.

  In those first few hours of his return from the dead, he’d also begun to apply rational thought to escape. He knew he was on one of a series of ledges that led to the bottom of the waterfall. Before she’d eluded him, he’d been in pursuit of the girl, aware that the series of ledges was part of an escape route. Metal hooks at the edge of the uppermost ledge supported a rope ladder that hung down to the next ledge. But climbing down was useless because the second rope ladder, leading to the third ledge, was missing.

  There was a solution though. If Mason could find a way to split the rope ladder lengthways, he’d be able to use one half of its length to drop to the next ledge and take the other half with him to drop to the ledge below it. From there, he’d be able to descend the other rope ladders already in place. He knew at the bottom there was a way out. She had taken it. She. Caitlyn. The freak who had humiliated him and left him to die this horrible death.

  In his few days trapped on the uppermost ledge, overwhelmed by panic because of his fear of the dark, he’d been uselessly chewing like an unreasoning animal on the rungs of a rope ladder coiled beside him, hoping to split the ladder.

  But with the rat that had attacked his right eye safely digesting, Mason had searched for a better way. He’d felt around in the dark until he found a rock with a sharp edge. Then he’d patiently hammered at the center of the first rung with that rock, imagining with each blow that he was driving granite splinters into the skull of Caitlyn, for hate sustained him as much as the protein and liquid he drew from the rats.

  Once that had succeeded in cutting through the rope, Mason knew he’d survive. There were plenty of other sharp rocks in this cave, and with rats to hunt, he’d have all the time he needed. Three weeks later, an estimate based on the count of rat tails and the length of his shaggy beard, he’d hung one length of rope from the metal hook at the edge of the ledge, and with the other half coiled around his waist and tied securely in place, he’d slid down to the second ledge, then repeated the drop to the third ledge with the uncoiled rope.

  All had gone as expected. Until he reached the bottom of the huge vertical cavern, where the final rope ladder had dropped him onto a small semicircular landing area carved into the rock beside the water.

  Sound, not sight, told him that the flow of the waterfall disappeared via an underground river. He couldn’t cross the river; the flow was too fast. With no way of seeing how the water exited, he could not evaluate his chances of survival by holding his breath and going into the river, especially because he did not know how to swim.

  Yet Mason Lee was too angry and too filled with hatred to give up on life. Caitlyn was Outside, somewhere. Fueled by fantasies of how he would exact revenge before drinking her blood just as he did from rats, he’d paced the semicircle, stopping only to kneel at the edge of the fast-flowing water when the pacing made him thirsty, grateful that he’d had the foresight to take with him as many dead rats as he could knot together by their tails. If this had been how the girl escaped, sooner or later others would come. His energy did not diminish, but rose with each day. Hatred and anger.

  Now finally, he heard voices.

  And saw the glow of flashlights, the first visual stimuli he’d had since being trapped on the ledge. He’d been so long in pitch black that the light was a stabbing pain again, but only in one eye, and it was in this moment he realized the rat had permanently blinded his right eye. His good eye, for his left eye was milky and had a tendency to wander.

  He’d lost his good eye. Because of Caitlyn.

  He’d deal with that soon enough.

  Now he was offered escape. The lights and voices came from two men bobbing in the water with life jackets.

  So this was how their kind fled Appalachia to the Outside.

  Their flashlights were directed in front of them, showing the end of the cavern, where a small gap existed between the top of the river and the channel into which it flowed. This close to freedom, they would not have expected any more danger.

  Mason couldn’t swim. But all he needed was a life jacket.

  “You smell something?” one man asked as they neared Mason.

  “Yeah,” the other said. “Some kind of animal.”

  They began to turn their flashlights toward the edge, where Mason was squatting.

  He’d conquered his greatest fear—darkness—and now felt immortal, exultant with life and rage, and as flashlight beams pinned him, he pounced from his squat, throwing himself through the air like a panther.

  THREE

  Theo heard footsteps, which caused him to anticipate two things.

  The first was that Billy’s soft snoring would stop. They slept close enough together that when Billy woke to the sound, Theo felt Billy’s huge body shift and tighten in response to possible danger.

  “It’s all right,” Theo whispered to his friend. “I’m awake. It sounds like little Phoenix.”

  It wasn’t pitch black in the soovie because it had been cloudless when nightfall arrived to tamp out some of the day’s heat, and there had not seemed much of a chance of rain before they’d cocooned themselves for the night. No cardboard cutouts to block the soovie’s window openings or the light of the half moon, or to muffle the raucous sounds of the soovie park.

  Theirs was a stripped soovie, with a low weekly rental that they paid by working in the nearby glass smelter. No upholstery on the ceiling, no panels on the interior of the doors. Carpet ripped out. All wiring long removed for the value of the copper. Even the seat paddings were gone, springs removed. Theo liked to imagine what it might have been like two generations earlier, humming down a highway. Before gasoline rationing became permanent and before the government realized it could control migration with selective gas coupons. The ubiquitous six- and eight-passenger vehicles had become junk, millions of them, useless—until after the Wars, when families were forced to set their axles on blocks and convert them into homes. The vehicle graveyards became the neighborhoods of a generation whose mobility was limited to these gutted metal shells.

  When it came to hearing, Billy Jasper never questioned Theo’s judgment. So Theo didn’t have to explain that when Phoenix’s left foot dragged, he could distinguish the slight rasping contact against the ground from all other noises. She and her mother lived in a soovie down the row and across.

  “She shouldn’t be out,” Billy whispered back. It was an obvious statement, so Theo knew Billy meant it as a question.

  Curfew began immediately after dark. In the summer, like now, that meant later at night. Community policing was instant and often brutal. It had to be. A soovie was a fine place to sleep out of the elements, but it was essentially a trap. Few had windows, so makeshift cardboard cutouts were used instead. The wealthier among them had sheet metal windows that could be put into place at night. When the weather was bad, a soovie with blocked windows—cardboard or sheet metal—gave the occupants no chance to see out. In a matter of seconds, an intruder could do a lot of damage to a sleeping occupant.

  Then came the second thing that Theo had anticipated.

  A tap on the door. The girl always came to them wh
en she needed help.

  “Billy? Theo?” Phoenix was only six, but no child survived in the soovie park without street smarts. She was whispering too, hoping not to wake anyone in the soovies around them. It was a huge risk. There was barely enough room from soovie to soovie to open a door.

  Theo didn’t hesitate. He was sitting upright and had slipped his glasses on at the sound of her footsteps, at least a full minute before she’d arrived. Theo leaned across Billy, who was still on his back, and cracked open the door.

  “Inside,” Theo said.

  With the lightness that only a child could possess, Phoenix scrambled over Billy. She didn’t giggle the way she usually did around Billy. The man was a giant, but children sensed his gentleness with far greater acumen than adults.

  Theo liked the soovie for the most part. The two front bucket seats provided a place to sit on afternoons when the soovie’s interior wasn’t too hot. Just pull out the cardboard window cutouts and let a breeze go through. Steering column was gone, so Theo found it roomy. Billy, on the other hand, would have felt crowded anywhere, so he didn’t complain either. Plenty of interior storage for their meager possessions and, where the engine block had been removed, a storage area that was securely padlocked.

  The back two-thirds served as a sleeping area. Theo had the driver’s side because he wasn’t nearly as large as Billy, who needed to fold down the front passenger seat to be able to stretch out completely.

  With the upholstery and padding gone, not many places for rats or mice to hide, so no scratching or chewing sounds to distract him as he fell asleep. With the wiring gone, it meant no possibility for light supplied by electricity from the central circuits. But Theo was fine with candles. He was also fine with showering and sewage arrangements—none. Billy and Theo were required to walk about a hundred yards among the rows of soovies to reach the communal outhouse. Because of curfew and intense embarrassment at using a chamber pot with Billy close by, Theo simply avoided drinking water any time after four in the afternoon. It left him parched, but that was better than the alternative.