This Mortal Coil (4 page)

Willem and Theresa stood still as statues, watching and waiting for just the right moment to catch the spotters off guard. Theresa wanted to go as soon as he clicked off the radio, but something told Willem to wait. Sure enough, the silence was shortly punctuated by the drag of a zipper and the rustle of fabric. One of the spotters emerged, working at his fly as if he were about to take a leak over the edge. His hands shot up quickly enough when Willem and Theresa stuck their rifles in his face. Theresa raised a finger to her lips while Willem crept forward; the spotter nodded.

“Geez, Oz!” the young man inside the tent protested when Willem yanked open the flap. “Give a guy a few minutes to rub one out, huh?”

“Sorry, kid. Not Oz.”

Whipping his head back, the younger man’s face dropped as he beheld Willem’s rifle pointed square at him. “Oh, fuck.” Swallowing hard, he raised his hands. “What do you want?”

“First, zip yourself up,” Willem said. “Then come out of the tent nice and slowly.”

The young man did as he was told, emerging carefully. “You’re making a big mistake. We’re not the ones you want, okay? We’re just spotters.”

“There’s no mistake,” Theresa reassured him, grinning grimly. “We want all of you. Each and every one.”

“We can help you. We’ll tell you where they are, when they move out and go to ground. We know everything, just please don’t kill us.”

“Shut the fuck up, Lucas,” the older one hissed.

Willem had heard enough out of the both of them. Raising the stock of his rifle abruptly, he struck the one called Oswald across the face with it, surprising even Theresa as the man collapsed in a semi-conscious heap. “Yeah, and just how to covertly signal them that you’ve been captured,” he spat down at Oswald’s limply twitching form. “We’re not going to kill you. Not yet. First we’re going to make you watch while we kill all your friends.” He gave Oswald a quick kick to the stomach for good measure before looking to Lucas. “Then… well, we’ll talk about that when the time comes.”

“Damn, Will. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

Willem lifted his eyes, smiling darkly in response. “Something tells me that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Now let’s get these two tied up.”

Theresa nodded. First, they made Lucas bind and gag Oswald, then Theresa covered Willem while he secured Lucas. With that done, they turned to inventorying the contents of the tent. Two earpieces. Two eyepieces. A book of ciphered coordinates laying open alongside a gridded, otherwise unlabeled map. Intriguing, but ultimately useless without the cipher to marry up the correct coordinates with the map.

For all that was worth, several items of far more immediate value stood out. A battery-powered space heater; jugs of purified water; rations of bread, dried fruit, even a few strips of leathery meat. The space heater in particular felt like nothing short of a godsend. Huddling around its warmth, they traded sips from the jugs and supped on the rations, never once bemoaning their lack of taste or difficult consistency. As far as they were concerned it was a feast fit for royalty, or at the very least kindred spirits.

“You know what the weirdest part of all this is?” Theresa wondered as they picked at the remains of the makeshift meal. Willem could only shrug by way of response. “I barely know you—hell, I barely know myself—but somehow this seems really familiar.”

He tilted his head, meeting the observation with a quizzical narrowing of his eyes. “What does? Fighting for our lives?”

Laughing airily, she nudged at his shoulder. “No, you dope. I mean, this. Eating together. I feel like we’ve done this before.”

There was a quiet, almost dangerous intimacy underpinning the moment; dangerous in the sense that it threatened to rob them of their most crucial asset, awareness. Unbeknownst to them, Oswald had regained consciousness and was slowly working to loosen the binding that held his wrists behind his back. When at last he freed himself, he bounded to his feet and bolted for the stairwell.

“Shit!”

They both went for their rifles. Theresa proved the faster of the two. With only seconds to draw a bead she leveled the barrel, took a bracing breath, and squeezed the trigger. Oswald’s headless corpse fell just feet short of the stairs, bits of bone and brain raining down around it like some macabre ticker-tape parade.

Outside the tent, Lucas looked on, eyes wide with mute horror. Theresa stepped in front of him. Aiming her rifle down, she gave him a questioning look. He just his shook his head.

“Smart boy,” she said.

Inspecting Oswald’s body, they found nothing especially useful on his person. “Damnit,” Willem murmured. “What are we going to do now?”

“Sleep and be warm.” The answer came to Theresa’s lips as naturally as her hands had found the rifle by her side.

She had a point, and indeed the rationale seemed straightforward enough. Still, the fact he had allowed his temper to put them in such a precarious spot irked him. “I wish I had your confidence.”

“I have enough for both of us. Now come on, the night’s not getting any younger,” she said, tugging him back to the tent by the sleeve of his jumpsuit.

They slept back to back in the tent, the warmth of the heater combined with that of their bodies giving them license to really, truly rest, if only for a few hours. With the gnawing cold held at bay by the heater’s gentle humming, Willem even found himself dreaming. It was a peculiar dream, one in which he seemed to be both participant and spectator at the same time.

He was on a gurney, wreathed in a gauzy white ether obscuring more of the scene than it illuminated. Theresa was there, too. They were much older than their present selves, yet Willem was certain he was remembering—
reliving?
—an event that had already taken place. He struggled to make sense of the sensation even as he watched their gurneys being drawn up side-by-side, their bodies covered with electrodes feeding vitals into a battery of monitoring devices nearby. There were others similarly situated around them but somehow their presence seemed inconsequential, like mannequins or set pieces designed only to fill the edges of the frame. When he tried to focus on them they began to fade like afterimages of some too-bright light.

Will?

Yes?

Their voices sounded hollow, strangely synthesized.

Have we gone too far?

A long pause.

That’s not for us to decide.

Isn’t it, though?

Willem sighed.

Their point of view changed abruptly. All at once they were outside the room looking in on themselves. A switch seemed all but to materialize between them.

Theresa reached for him. Before she could grasp his arm, he flipped the switch.

A jagged burst of static filled his ears. It was followed by a lens flare so bright it burned white-hot against the backs of his eyelids, tearing him from sleep like a newborn babe torn from the womb. He opened his eyes tentatively, blinking away the attendant disorientation of the dream. It was first light, the sun not even high and bright enough to require squinting against.

So why then did he feel as if he had just spent several minutes staring directly into it?

He shifted in the bedroll, feeling only empty space beside him. Emerging from the tent, he found Theresa huddled over Oswald’s corpse, her bent backside obscuring her diligence.
 

“So help me, kid, if you keep staring at my ass—”

“I don’t think he’s staring so much as wondering what you’re going to do if you don’t find what you’re looking for.” Beside him, Lucas nodded vigorously. “What are you looking for, anyway?”

“I don’t know. A key or a code book or something. They had to use something to decrypt those coordinates. Figured if either of them had it, it’d be the older one.”

Lucas shook his head, trying to speak through the gag.

Willem eyed the young man with a raised brow. “Something to add?” he asked, yanking the gag from the young man’s mouth.

“No book,” he gasped. “We memorized.”

“How do we know you’re telling the truth?”

“Hey, man, I’m new. I barely know these people. Right now I’m just trying to stay alive. You think I want to end up like him? Tell me what you need and I swear I’ll do what I can. Just please don’t shoot me with those things.”

Pitching a glance to Theresa, Willem asked, “Think we should see what he can tell us?”

“Why not? It’s early yet. We’ve got time.”

Willem watched anxiously as Theresa, wearing Oswald’s ill-fitting uniform, rounded a corner several blocks away.
 

“Two—no, three blocks up ahead from your current position. Left and then right, then left again, over.”

“
Got it. Left, right, left, over
.”

He switched frequencies, calling out conflicting directions to the team of hunters stalking the same target. A moment later he watched them trek off obliviously from the safety of his perch. Theresa, meanwhile, navigated the urban labyrinth according to his directions in search of their first rescue. She cornered the figure in the orange jumpsuit at the end of a blind alley.

“
Do it if you’re going to do it
,” he heard a woman’s voice say through Theresa’s earpiece as he switched back to her frequency. “
Just make it quick already
.”

“
I’m not a hunter
.”

The woman had closed her eyes tightly in anticipation of her fate. At the sound of Theresa’s words, she chanced to open them. With each passing second they widened just so. She said nothing, regarding Theresa with a mix of clouded emotions. Even from a quarter-mile away Willem could clearly see the confusion wrinkling her brow, the guarded relief behind the mask of disbelief she wore across her face.

“
I’m not a hunter
,” Theresa repeated. “
I’m not one of them
.”

“
What—what are you then
?”

“
A friend. My name is Theresa. If you want to live you need to come with me, now
.”

“
I do
,” the woman said, collecting herself off the pavement with a determined nod. “
I want to live
.”

Theresa touched the device hugging the curve of her ear. “
I got her, Will. Bring us home, over
.”

“Okay, here goes.”

Repeating the same directions backwards, Willem led Theresa and her charge back to the building they had made camp in the day before. It was only the first of a handful of ad hoc rescue missions they ran that day. Even under duress—or perhaps because of it—Lucas was an invaluable asset. He gave them unrivaled insight into the communications system governing the exchanges between spotters and hunters. He deciphered the code book from memory and explained the gridded, color-coded map. He even brewed Willem a cup of his favorite tea using the ration water and packets of sugar and dried hibiscus leaves from his own personal stores. It proved surprisingly energizing, giving him the focus he needed to continue directing Theresa and the hunters away from each other.

Still, none of that made it any easier for Willem to explain why the hunting party’s prey kept outsmarting them despite the benefit of his all-seeing eye. He played it off at first by saying Oswald was feeling under the weather, but that only held water for so long. Soon, they were on the verge of becoming less than forgiving, if not downright suspicious. Finally, Theresa made the obvious, if less than savory, call.

“
We have to throw them a bone, Will
.”

Try as he might to think of an alternative, Willem knew she was right. In just three runs they brought five others back to Theresa’s rooftop refugee camp. If he didn’t let the hunters bag at least one of the runners they would almost certainly send someone up to replace the deficient spotter team, possibly with a rifle-toting team behind him. Then all hell would break loose. It made him sick to think he would have to lead the bastards to someone they might otherwise be able to save, but there was simply no other way around it. “Fine,” he groused, “but I don’t have to like it.”

He could practically hear her scowling through the earpiece as she shot back, “
I didn’t say I liked it, just that it needed doing. So do it already and be done with it
.” And then she was gone, the line a wash of silence as he wrestled with the decision he knew he had to make. If he failed to provide fresh prey for the hunters, they would almost certainly be dead before the day was out. Theresa was right. He didn’t have to like it, but the thing needed doing.

Lifting the eyepiece, he got to work scanning the maze of streets for a sacrifice.

For several minutes he saw nothing, not even the slightest hint of movement. Could it be they had rounded up everyone left alive? That there was no one else left to hunt? He was starting to get antsy, especially when the earpiece chimed in his ear. The voice on the other end of the transmission belonged to the leader of the team systematically hunting and killing them.

“
Lucas, what’s your status? Me and the boys are getting antsy down here, over
.”

Willem almost laughed in spite of himself. What an apropos choice of words, he thought.

“Scanning, Team Leader. No joy so far though, over.”

There was an audible hiss through the line that was clearly not static. “
Gotta say, Lucas, we’ve got some mighty itchy trigger fingers down here. You gonna give us something to go after or are you just pullin’ your pud up there? Over
.”