Hollow Read online

  “You’ve never been in love.” The white-robed cleric said, smiling.

  Bai waved his hand dismissively, “I’ve never ridden a unicorn, either.”

  The white-robed cleric changed subjects, “And if they succeed, if they actually pull this off?”

  “We move up a circle or three in the Forbidden City, maybe even into the Party. And we retire the whole team… they’re too dangerous to us. But this mission must succeed.”

  “This mission can’t succeed, you know that, Bai.”

  “I want you to think about this: You think anyone’s more likely than Ash to beat all odds and pull off this hit from inside?” He raised his eyebrows, “You think anyone is more likely to lead his team in a successful breach of that installation than Crow… when he’s breaching to reach Ash?”

  The white Cleric’s mouth dropped open, “You are not a complete idiot… wow. I hadn’t before suspected.”

  “Yes Liu, and either way this goes down, Phoenix won’t be around to cause us any more trouble.”

  “Still, it’s such a waste.” Liu went back to his typing. “At least we can use their DNA for the next generation… maybe we’ll even splice those two together… so romantic.”

  Haiku Fugue

  A dream, dreamed in Chicago, 2020

  Backward: blood, snow, sky

  Scarred, strong hand holds her, draws her

  Somewhere without hope

  Sliding backward through thick wet snow. Thick downy flakes fill the air, blazing bright as stars with each booming flash then dimming to ash with the return of night. His hand is wrapped around the strap at the nape of her neck as he drags her backward at a dead run. Her damaged legs color their path in the snow a red that looks black in the urban gloom.

  Shadows move and the lightning strikes again: the flash, the boom. She hears his breathing, his feet on the snowy concrete, they are almost gone, almost free, almost in bondage again.

  But for now, she has purpose, they have purpose. Her eyes blur, no time for a tourniquet, so her heart pumps her blood away in hot spurts, but her hands move, the thunder comes again.

  She knows they are almost gone, almost home… and she sorrows.

  White-hot fire inside

  Its agony a comfort

  Happily endured

  The white of snow gives way to a wet tropical heat and she curls in the mud, trying to wrap herself tighter around her abdomen, which is full of thorns and flame. The wet earth below her; the tall grass is stained with her blood. The medkit is strapped around her abdomen, staunching the bleeding while her organs stitch themselves back into place. The kit doesn’t deaden the pain as it works, but that’s fine by her; she’s alive, and the overwhelming pain proves it. Near her, three men in gray-green camouflage fatigues and armor crouch, firing through the chest-high grass with short automatic weapons. One of them shouts commands into the air as he works.

  The shouting man takes a high velocity round in the right shoulder, his armor exploding in a halo of destroyed ceramic, alloys and flesh as he is thrown a half turn toward her. His high intensity conversation continues uninterrupted as his legs compensate for the impact and he regains his balance. His right arm hangs useless at his side, partially covering the black rifle now hanging impotent on a single point sling around his head and wounded shoulder, blood drips from the slack fingertips, sizzles on the heated barrel. As usual, she has a hard time distinguishing where the man ends and the weapon begins. He sees her and his eyes sparkle. His right eye crinkles into a reassuring wink.

  A blur of motion and his sidearm is in his left hand. The pistol barks three times as his arm sweeps through a forty-five degree arc before him then the pistol dips down fractionally for one more shot. She knows from his body language that there are three dead people behind her and that he is disappointed with the need for the fourth shot. His eyes settle on her and she smiles into his intensity. She tries to say something witty and insulting, but only coughs blood and is nearly knocked out by the agony of the experience.

  Floating through the air

  Fire’s marionette, dancing

  Caught by cracked concrete

  The smell of explosives intensifies and she flies through the air. The pavement passes before her blurred vision twice before she slams into it in a shower of concrete fragments and dust. Before her face is an upended public trashcan, “Thank You”, the friendly words on the half-melted lid tell her. In spite of the shattered arm, the broken ribs, and the shrapnel in her leg that she’s still unaware of, she chokes out, “You’re welcome.” She’s still laughing and coughing when the world goes black.

  Victory is life!

  Her lips move, her heart rebels

  Victory is life!

  From the blackness, headlights—ominous and approaching.

  In front of the headlights, a silhouette.

  The yellow light inside the car blooms into existence and the silhouette resolves into a profile of Jo’s smiling face.

  Behind her face, the glare of the headlights dims to two points of light slowly expanding in the driver’s side window. From her position in the passenger seat, Jo wonders if she has ever seen herself, third-person-style, in a dream.

  Jo sees herself, this apparition, this avatar, driving the car, sitting on the green sparkly seat, head nodding in time with the goodtime music on the radio. From her vantage in the passenger seat, the scene is distorted, as if seen through a slightly warped lens—clearer at the center, distorted and hazy on the periphery. Behind the wheel, Other Jo taps her fingers in time with the music as her lips move with the words of the song; her hair flips about as she swings her head with the music. Though the driver looks like Jo, she is a stranger Jo has never met. Her carefree face is unencumbered by the scars Jo knows from the mirror. There is no Frankenstein scar protruding from the collar of her shirt, winding its way to her ear. There are no burn scars wrapping around her right arm between elbow and wrist… This is the “Unknown Jo”, the stranger she was before the accident.

  On the dashboard, a plastic figurine of a bird with a black hood over its head is attached above the instrument cluster. The bird’s hooded head bobbles along with the motion of the car, or possibly the music. “Falcon” hisses through her mind and she recognizes the type of bird the figurine depicts. A tantalizing sense of significance washes over her, but fades before any of its promises can be realized.

  From her passenger’s-seat vantage, Jo’s ghost sees a white truck materialize around the two burning headlights beyond her pre-crash apparition’s window. The truck seems to creep forward, stalking pre-crash Jo in a dreamy slow motion. The truck slides closer, growing in the window behind Jo’s oblivious twin. Though at first the truck seems sinister, its grill gaping like a predator’s mouth, upon closer inspection the truck is covered with images of orange, stylized kittens, somewhat lessening the overall impression of menace. “Clarence’s Canine Transbreed Surgery” is written in a swoopy, rainbow arch above the cab, with the smaller legend “Releasing the kitten trapped deep inside your vicious dog” below.

  “Look out!” Jo screams, but her unscarred incarnation doesn’t seem to hear.

  “Kittens on your nine!” she shouts again, but still no response. Then, when it is clearly too late, her clone seems to notice the impending kitten-oriented disaster and immediately releases the steering wheel in favor of a melodramatic stage scream, performed with hands on the sides of her head and her mouth stretched wide.

  After a comically long bout of screaming, slow-truck-approaching, and wild-eyed gesticulating, her clone suddenly stops the bad acting and turns the volume up on the radio. She taps her fingers on the steering wheel for a few seconds, seeming to get back into the music while she waits. She interrupts her groove twice to check her watch.

  Then the truck slams into the door and a cloud of glass and metal fills the air. “Eeek!” the clone squeaks as she turns to the passenger seat, looking directly into Jo’s eyes.

  “Now isn’t this ridicul
ous?” unscarred Jo says with Dr. Smith’s voice and precise diction.

  Then, with a conspiratorial wink, unscarred Jo waves and shouts, “Ciao!” just as the driver’s door begins to crumple slowly inward under the truck’s laconic inevitability. She reaches back over both shoulders and pulls a black hood up and over her head, hiding her face. As the hood covers her clone’s head, the world again goes dark—floating silence.

  The knife scrapes between collar bone and ribs, grinding past chipping bones, sizzling through parting flesh, seeking through flowing blood and darkness.

  Terror stalks the night

  Wounded tiger falls asleep

  Sweet kitten awakes

  Interbellum

  Chicago, October 15, 2020 9:52pm

  Time passed and Jo again became aware of the darkness, then of low voices far away. “…see anything?”—a hard woman’s voice.

  “Just as the alert went off, I felt it coming…” another woman’s whispered voice, more familiar—Jackie! “Maybe I heard something, but now I’m not sure. I drew, but never got a target before the lights went out. As soon as I turned back, I got it in the face.”

  “No impressions? Male or female?”

  “I don’t want to sound sexist, but it felt male… actually, if felt like a baseball bat—a big, burly male baseball bat on anabolic steroids—though I’m pretty sure it was a fist.”

  “Numbers?”

  “No idea, but my ego wants to say more than one. They got my piece and my purse… they got Jo’s phone and wallet too.”

  “You’re not telling me you got robbed…” the hard woman said, incredulous, “this wasn’t random… quiet now, here she comes.”

  Footsteps, then, “Detective,” a kindly and familiar woman’s voice said, “what happened here? Is she going to be okay?”

  Jo’s eyes opened, but all she could see was eighty percent eyelid and an overwhelming twenty percent of bright, blurry light above.

  “Don’t worry, doc.” A third woman’s voice said, “Medtechs tell me just bumps and bruises, nothing serious. The techs say there’s a lot of old damage, though…”

  “Dr. Smith?” Jo croaked, raising her head. Maybe fifty feet across the blurry but clarifying parking garage, three women: Dr. Smith, Jackie, and a plainclothes police detective stood huddled together. It occurred to Jo that they should have been a lot closer, as she’d heard their mostly whispered conversation perfectly well.

  “Ah! She’s awake!” The previously unnoticed medtech kneeling at Jo’s right elbow announced as Jo struggled into a sitting position. He put a hand on her shoulder, “Hey, what’s the hurry? You’re going to be fine. Take it easy, okay?”

  “I’d ask what happened, but I’m guessing you don’t know either.” Jo said, rubbing the back of her head, where it felt like an angry jellyfish had taken up residence. A fragment of what might have been memory stirred, and her hand moved quickly to her chest. She probed the area just beneath her left collarbone where she thought she remembered being knifed to death.

  No gaping wound; no fresh stitches… there was blood on her collar and a nasty three inch scratch beneath her collarbone. Maybe her memory was faulty, or maybe the psycho had gotten squeamish or been interrupted before he’d finished stabbing her? That didn’t sound right. Great—now she had to tell Smith about violent death hallucinations as well as mysterious fainting spells.

  “You lose a necklace?” the tech ventured, seeing Jo feeling for the missing mortal wound at her neck. “If it’s not already incredibly obvious, you and your friend were robbed,.”

  “So that was robbery, eh?” Jo said, still a bit hazy, “It’s overrated—I think I slept through it.”

  “Ha! That’s the spirit!” the tech gave her left shoulder an encouraging squeeze, “The important thing is that you’re fine. No serious injuries, at least no recent serious injuries…” he said, stowing his medkit, “You need help getting up?” he held out a hand, and when she nodded, he took her elbow.

  When she stood, the world only seemed to tilt slightly, and she didn’t have to lean on the ambulance long. Deep breathing took care of the nausea in only a few more seconds. “How long was I out?” she said after a particularly long exhale.

  “Now that depends when your nap started,” the tech said, releasing her elbow and checking his watch, “It’s almost ten now.”

  “Ten?” Jo looked up sharply, “That’s almost fifty minutes!”

  “Fainting doesn’t usually last that long…”

  “No, really?” She said, with a look usually reserved for dolts and the over-indulged children of strangers.

  “Jo,” Dr. Smith gently interrupted from behind, “I was so worried when the police called—are you all right?” as Jo turned, Smith walked up with Jackie and a rough-looking woman of about forty. The stranger had a detective’s badge hanging from her lapel pocket.

  “Yeah fine, doc, but apparently I don’t get enough sleep at home…” she turned to the medtech, “Was I drugged or something?”

  “Yes, actually.” The medtech winced, “I was going to ask you about your party habits before the detective here arrived…”

  “What?!” Jo was pretty sure she understood what the tech was implying, but she couldn’t understand how it could apply to her.

  “Was this assault drug-related, Miss Farris?” The detective raised her tablet to take notes, “I’m going to need the name of your dealer…” It occurred to Jo that the detective’s voice didn’t sound like the hard voice she’d heard talking to Jackie as Jo woke from her odd dreams of death and kittens. Though the detective’s appearance was all gruff business, her voice was musical, making it sound sweet, even now when she was doing her best to shock an admission out of drug-dealing Jo. She wondered briefly if this made her a perp or a suspect… suspected perp?

  “Don’t let her pressure you honey,” the tech patted Jo on the shoulder, “Remember, it’s not a crime to do drugs, just to sell them… you’re the victim in that crime.”

  “I’m not a victim!” Jo shouted, exasperated. Then the irony seemed to both punch and tickle her in the stomach and she half winced, half smiled. “…of drugs.” she added sheepishly, “Er… at least not on purpose.” She shrugged and shook her head.

  “Really?” The tech tapped away at his tablet for a few seconds, “Your tox screen is lit up like a Christmas tree, most of it unclassified… hallucinogen, insane amount of sedatives, four flavors of neuroinhibitor—and those are just guesses based on general molecular profiles. Honey, you’re a big, experimental pharmacy.”

  “I don’t do drugs!” her words were half confusion, half an unfamiliar and increasing hardness.

  “Actually, you do.” Smith said so softly that it took a few seconds for the implication to sink in.

  “Now listen, I’m not scr… eh?” Jo had just been raising her finger, preparing to get really assertive. She paused in mid gesticulation, finger wavering then finally lowering. “Sorry, I think I spaced out for a second there… what?”

  Smith looked around like anyone’s most patiently attentive grandmother, waiting for complete conversational control, frustratingly lovable woman that she was. “The reason I’m here is because I got paged when they accessed your medical records as a part of the initial triage process.” Another pause, just long enough to pique curiosity to the point of annoyance, “You are on an internal drip of twelve experimental compounds under my supervision. It’s part of your current treatment regimen. They are the only thing that woke you from your coma after the accident.”

  “Wha? I don’t remember signing any release forms for that.” Jo said, dubious.

  “Jo, you were in the coma for four years before these treatments.” Smith looked at her earnestly, “You are part of a clinical trial regimen that is still under development and rather sensitive… that’s corporate speak for ‘secret’, by the way.” Smith smiled, looking around the group, “Jo, you had no consent because you were simply not conscious until the treatments.”


  “But you don’t give me any pills or shots…” Jo still couldn’t accept this.

  “Like I said Jo, it’s an internal drip. There’s a small pharmic implant that manufactures and releases the drugs as needed…”

  “Wait a sec…” the medtech was prodding his tablet again, “I hate to be factcheck.org here, but there’s no pharmic implant in her…”

  “I’m going to have to ask you for those scans, by the way.” Smith interrupted, “Trade secrets, you know…” Smith turned to Jo, concern in her eyes, “But enough of the pro talk, we need to get you home to bed.”

  “I’m not tired,” Jo lied. “Besides, I can’t just go home… I’ve got to… oh yeah, I guess I can. Man, your drugs must be good, doc.”

  “I’ll see she gets home.” Jackie said, stepping to Jo’s side.

  “Jo,” Smith said, putting a hand on Jo’s shoulder, “I was going to tell you about the pharmic implant after we’d made a bit more progress. I’m sorry you had to find out like this.”

  “Hey, I’ve got a few questions here.” The detective said. “Let’s start with…”

  “They can wait, detective.” Smith cut her off, “my patient needs to rest after an amazingly traumatic experience. I’d be happy to answer what I can, but any questions you have for her will have to wait.”

  The detective looked both confused and angry. “Really? You can answer why your patient passed out just before a robbery? You can explain why someone would go through the trouble of disabling four security cameras just to snatch two purses?”

  “I don’t carry a purse…” Jo started.