Hollow Page 2

  Jo settled back onto the couch and let her gaze return to the dark skylight above and her distant reflection. She stared at the reflected stranger for a few long seconds in silence then she closed her eyes. For an instant, she saw a vague afterimage of her reflection in the blackness. Then there was a flicker of sound and shadows and for an instant she was in a snowy street, gray buildings rising high around her. Quick thunder surrounds her, booming hollow and fast. Her leg flies out from under her and she lands in the reddening snow, gasping.

  She blinked her eyes a few times, back in the moment, back on Dr. Smith’s comfortable leather couch. She glanced quickly at the doctor, who was waiting patiently for an answer.

  Now that was just a little too imaginative, Jo thought… and just not upbeat at all. She tried to push away the strange visions of blood and snow that still filled the fleeting darkness whenever she blinked. The crash happened in late spring, not in the snow. It had happened in suburban Cary, not in a dark distinctly European city with narrow cobbled streets. Jo closed her eyes again. The clean taste of snow, the warmth soaking her thin gloves as she tries to apply pressure to her wounded leg, the mind-numbing pain she disregards like the beating of her heart. Her hands reach out for something she dropped… something important. No!

  Jo’s head jerked up, her eyes searching the office for some unspecified danger, but all was quiet.

  “What?” Smith asked, stylus poised to journal Jo’s response.

  “I don’t like thinking about how I got my tattoos.” Jo evaded.

  “Tattoos?”

  “I like to think of them as my textured body art.”

  “Ah.” Smith said, scribbling inscrutable notes “It’s normal for accident survivors to struggle with the physical aftermath of their trauma… scars and disabilities can be potent mementos, like a scent that brings back an old and powerful memory…”

  “Except for mine,” Jo said, feeling suddenly tired, “While my extensive map of bygone damage does manage to freak me out in the shower and keeps me from sunbathing at the beach, it doesn’t remind me of anything—which is kinda the whole reason we’re here.”

  She covered her eyes with her palms, fingers splayed across her forehead. Her ear is stinging numb from the snow, he grabs her by the strap at the top of the minimal pack on her back and drags her backward toward the shadows at the edge of the street. She struggles with her hands, fighting against the stranger who is pulling her backward into darkness. Flash photo: the fog of her breath frozen before her eyes, snow hangs thick as ash in the air—her blood slicks the trail left by her dragging body—darkness approaching from behind, from within—the smell of cordite—the familiar feel of the smile on her lips.

  “…even listening to me, are you, Jo? Jo?” Smith snapped her fingers between them, curiosity and consternation mixing in her eyes.

  “Oh.” Jo tried to take some of the force out of her hands, but even after she removed her palms from her eyes, starbursts filled her vision. “I’m having a bit of trouble focusing…”

  “Jo, this is not a new phenomenon.” Smith settled back into her chair, bringing her stylus to the ready. “I’m not trying to be critical, but you are not the poster girl for precision thinking.”

  As always, her doctor’s dry humor surprised her, and she found herself smiling and nodding. “You’ve got my number, doc.”

  “What were you thinking about? Your expression was a bit… intense.”

  Jo thought for a few beats before continuing, “I had the strangest thought. Have I ever been attacked?”

  Two or three seconds passed as Smith processed the question. “Attacked? You mean like mugged in the park?”

  Jo nodded.

  “Well, let me check.” The doctor prodded her tablet for a moment, nodding from time to time, brow furrowing at others. “No.” She said finally.

  “No?” Jo’s eyelids lowered under a weight of suspicion, “Is that all? Just no?”

  “What were you expecting?” Smith gave Jo a look easily confused with patience, “You were not attacked in a box, you were not attacked with a fox, you were not attacked here or there, you were not attacked anywhere.”

  Jo laughed, thoughts of the preschool filling her head. “No, I guess not… ‘no’ just sounded evasive, I guess.” She snickered again, thoughts of Seuss driving away her unanticipated demons.

  “Anaya loves that story… ok, I love that story.” Jo giggled. “But ‘Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?’ is my favorite Dr. Seuss book by far.”

  “Focus, Jo.” Smith cautioned.

  “You know, most moms look for excuses to talk about their children…”

  Smith sighed and gave her head a small shake. “Okay, one more question first. Were you really going to school the day of the crash?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, you looked like you were dealing with some stress there, thinking about the crash. I thought you might be remembering something. Maybe something painful?”

  Jo spent a few seconds wrestling with the unanticipated question, thinking about blood and snow and somehow feeling guilty. Finally, she allowed curiosity to distract her from probably important introspection. “Why wouldn’t I be going to school?”

  “Jo,” Smith sighed out a breath, “this really works better if you think and answer rather than think and ask…”

  “Yes, but…” Jo started, but Smith held up a hand and continued, “…but I know how stubborn you are when your curiosity has been engaged, so I’ll answer your question.”

  Jo settled back onto the couch, listening.

  Smith steepled her fingers, “Jo, I know it was almost time for school when you had the accident, but you weren’t heading toward the school when the other car hit you… did someone send you on an errand? Do you know who might have sent you on that errand?”

  “Uh…” Jo lay, mired in confusion for a moment, “Errand? Does that matter?”

  “It might,” Smith said with practiced nonchalance, “Sometimes the secrets we hold most dear are the first thing to emerge from the darkness of amnesia… sometimes they are the first threads to pull on. Sometimes they’re critically important to the healing process.”

  Jo closed her eyes again, but found only the blackness this time. No snow, no blood, no desperate struggle came to shatter the darkness. “Honestly,” Jo said finally, “Secrets feel right. I don’t know why, but I think that you’re right. It is important where I was going and why.”

  “So,” Smith prompted, “no fragments of memory just now? Why did you ask if you’d ever been attacked?”

  Jo took a breath and then told Smith about the odd visions, the violence, the dark stranger pulling her into the shadowy alley, the bloody trail in the snow. Smith scribbled furiously on her tablet as Jo talked, then for several minutes after Jo stopped.

  “Okay then, a deal’s a deal. How is Anaya doing?” Smith asked, willing to change the subject momentarily, “Is she still stumping you with the vocabulary?”

  Jo hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath until she blew it out in relief. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting from the doctor, condemnation maybe, at least scrutiny, but the distraction came as an intensely welcome surprise.

  “That kid’s a four-year-old genius,” Jo raised herself onto an elbow, “She called me a clodpoll yesterday… I had to look it up.”

  A deeper warmth touched Smith’s eyes, “Home schooling.” She pronounced with a small shrug.

  “Yeah, like you have time to home school your child?”

  “Full service maid.”

  “Your maid is an English professor?”

  “No, my maid takes care of everything but the parenting…”

  “…Which you leave to your English grad-student nanny, right?”

  “I hear she learns quite a bit at preschool. You are her favorite teacher, Jo. I’ve told you that before. She’s very glad I helped get you that job.”

  “She just likes stumping me with her mom’s hun
dred dollar words.”

  Smith put her hand up between them, “Okay Jo, our fifty minute hour is fleeting. Back to business. We can talk about my genius daughter afterwards. Now—” the springs in Smith’s chair gave a soft complaint as she leaned back again, repositioning her tablet, “are you connecting better with your coworkers?”

  Jo shrugged and evaded. “I connect pretty well with the kids. I guess it’s because the four-year-olds only have a little more than three years of experience on me.”

  “How are things going with Jackie and Mel?”

  More shrugging, "Ah, well, I like them… they’re responsible and they love the kids… they’re funny and optimistic…”

  “What was your last interaction with either of them?”

  “Melanie asked me to cover for her yesterday and I answered her with words?” Jo smiled hopefully.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said ‘Okay.’” Jo bit her lip.

  “Words, indeed.” Smith arched an eyebrow, took a deep breath.

  “I, uh…” Jo started, then lapsed back into silence.

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself, Jo.” Smith put away her tablet and leaned forward, “Until you can recover your memories, you are walking in the dark, a stranger in this world.”

  Jo looked at Smith, but she saw Smith’s reassuring smile only as a flash before Jo’s eyes darted away again. Smith continued, “This is all going to work out. You’ll see.”

  “Now,” Smith said, assuming the analyst’s position again, “back to the hard work. Tell me about your mother…”

  “I’m sure she was probably a lot like you. I can almost see her making jokes to calm me down when I’d skinned my knee or something.” Jo said, meaning it.

  The doctor’s stylus faltered; she looked up with a small surprised grin and, just for a second, Jo could almost imagine what a mother might look like.

  The Beginning

  --Who seeks the Hallow?

  We are vengeful angels in an empty world

  We live by fist and fire and discipline

  Preserved by hallowed heat and holy purpose

  Victory is life!

  -- What is your desire?

  Give us fire!

  Through its fury we keep ourselves from darkness

  We will bear it with focus

  We will burn until we conquer

  Victory is life!

  -- Then enter child, enter and serve!

  Victory is life!

  Victory is life!

  Victory is life!

  - The League Catechisms: Invocation

  The Hallowed World

  Inalcançável, Brazil, 2019

  Crow stood motionless beside Shadow. They stood before a heavy steel door at one end of a long empty hallway. Crow’s left hand was on the door, fingers splayed, pressing gently as if somehow the contact would allow him to perceive the room behind the door. He closed his eyes, listening, waiting. She was late.

  The hallway was a uniform and antiseptic bright. White floors and walls reflected the subtle flickering light of too many fluorescents above, bouncing it around until it seemed that they stood inside one of the long fluorescent tubes, steeping in its merciless bright. In spite of their immediate surroundings, outside these innermost corridors, most of the complex slept under a starless canopy of Brazilian summer heat. Outside the compound, beyond its dual perimeter fences with their razor wire, searchlights and guard posts, the black of a moonless midnight covered the restless chaos of an unconquered rainforest. Crow remembered slipping through that shifting forest, silent as the shadow of a shark in an ocean of black-green foliage.

  Here, with his eyes pressed closed in the silence of the hall, the faint buzz of the fluorescent tubes seemed to expand in his ears, filling them like the light filled the hall. The door before him was heavy, a reinforced steel alloy that would not yield easily to breaching charges, or at least not to those they’d brought today. Crow wasn’t surprised that he could hear very little from the other side of the formidable door. Every now and then the phantom sound of voices emerged from the hum of the lights, but never with enough volume to bring any meaning with them.

  She was late.

  But she was close. Not in the room yet maybe, but getting closer. There was no science in the feeling. Crow wasn’t sure if it was imagination or hope or simply a bug in the code that governed the Hallow. Crow’s brow furrowed as he considered how often he saw Ash in his mind before he saw her with his eyes. He wasn’t sure what it meant, if anything, but distracting as it was, it wasn’t something he wanted to fix.

  Crow looked sideways at Shadow. Shadow’s head was down, his face set in complete concentration. The fingers of his right hand traced across the screen of his tablet as he monitored the security feeds he’d hacked and alarm systems he’d disabled. The dull black mass of Shadow’s submachine gun hung on a single point sling at his side, swinging slightly as he worked. Crow checked the mission clock, one hour and five minutes since the incursion began. Crow was careful to keep his composure completely neutral, but still… she should have been here by now.

  He had checked the mission clock two more times before—with her typical flourish—she arrived.

  Through the door’s thick steel Crow heard the muted sound of shattering glass, two hard chuffs, then a quick succession of shuffle-pops and muted thuds gave way to the silence of a successful mission. If Ash had failed, there would have been shouts of defiant anger, cries of alarm or pain. If she’d failed, Crow knew he would have heard unsilenced gunfire. If she had failed, he definitely wouldn’t have heard the buzz and click as the door’s lock disengaged. He knew what he would find before he pushed the door open.

  Crow turned the knob and pushed it inward. The heavy door swung silently open to reveal an office that was a stark contrast to the cold efficiency of the compound they’d seen so far. The expensive carpet and dark wood furnishings seemed to have been transplanted from a distant and far more opulent society. The room was dominated by an imposing mahogany desk directly across from the door. Between the door and the desk, two bodyguards lay unmoving, the expensive carpet darkening with the slowly spreading bloom of their spilled life. Behind the desk, a shattered window admitted the warm perfume of the nighttime jungle, a rappelling rope swinging before the opening. By the desk, another bodyguard lay, breathing but unconscious; his pistol lay among the coral at the bottom of an expansive tropical fish tank about ten feet away.

  Crow lowered his weapon slightly, keeping it close to his body, but moving it mostly out of his field of view. He moved into the office, tracking left as Shadow entered and moved to the right.

  The cool resonance of the goal-tone sounded in their ears, followed by the electronic chirp indicating communication on the command channel. The tone was followed by a smooth voice that still managed to sound more synthetic than the chirp that preceded it. “Helmet camera verification. Target eliminated. Secondary objective complete.” Their Cleric paused, then added “Knife kill bonus confirmed.”

  Behind the desk, Ash rose from her crouch. She sheathed an eight inch blackened steel combat knife and drew the silenced pistol from the breakaway holster at her hip. The suppressed .45 Kriss K20 submachine guns and the silenced pistols the team carried were quiet—somewhere between a robot’s clanking cough and a bullwhip’s crack—but Ash’s knife was completely silent.

  As Crow came around the desk, another unconscious guard came into view, then finally the body of their target, his expensive gray suit nearly as ruined as his throat. Ash stepped over the corpse, approaching Crow. She noticed him looking at the two unconscious guards by the desk and favored him with a slight stretch of the lips and a subtle shift of her shoulders that might have been a shrug.

  “Softy.” Crow pronounced with a dismissive shake of his head. “Nice touch.” He inclined his head toward the gun in the fish tank.

  Ash’s sharp eyes glittered with amusement. She flicked her eyes up quickly. Crow followed the gesture
and saw the other guard’s pistol with its barrel stuck in the sheet rock of the ceiling.

  Crow snorted and his eyes returned to Ash.

  A beautiful hard; scarred a perfect terrible; cool, radiant Ash. If Crow had any idea what a haiku was, he’d be composing now. She tilted her head a fraction of an inch, black hair hiding beneath her minimal helmet like treasure to be discovered.

  He realized she was waiting for him, so he keyed his comm and returned to his role. “Primary objective?”

  Ash smiled and held a small data stick up between them. She popped a rubber seal high on the left side of her body armor and inserted the data stick into the newly exposed port. There was a chirp, several metronomic clicks, followed by a completion chirp.

  “Data upload received.” Their distant Cleric seemed to be speaking to himself as he worked, “Verifying encryption… Type II ultra. We’ll crack it but it will take time. Looks good… he had no other secure data on him?”

  “No. I already uploaded data from his phone, and the desktop is a husk… no internal storage.”

  “Primary objective complete.” The Cleric pronounced over the command channel.

  Crow nodded to himself and keyed the team channel. “Is our primary extraction path clear, Tink?”

  “Clear,” crackled through distance and deep encryption, sounding in their ears, “two roving patrols on eight minute intervals… not chumps, but I can handle most of them if you blow the timing. I’ll need a heads-up before you break cover.”

  “Acknowledge.” Crow said. He keyed the command channel, “Phoenix requesting primary evac.”

  Static, silence, then the familiar voice of their Cleric, “The ‘craft will be on site in five. Chirp at minus two minutes.”

  “Acknowledge. Phoenix out.” Crow keyed the team channel. “Extraction in five. Ash, point. I’ve got rear. Shadow’s on cleanup.”

  They turned to the door and rejoined Shadow, who had moved to cover the hall. As Ash moved to cover point, Shadow slung his weapon, expanded his tablet, and got to work. They wound quickly through the twisting corridors of the compound with Shadow stumbling between them as he carefully undid the code insertions that had compromised sections of the compound’s security systems. Several times they paused briefly for Shadow to collect the small modular cameras he had left behind to monitor their escape route.