Nate Kenyon - Day One

Hawke shook his head. “They got the wrong guy,” he said. “Misunderstanding. Comes with the territory, you know?”

“Hope so.” The man grabbed a beer from the fridge, cracked the tab and took a long drink. “Hotter in here than outside,” he said. “You should get some air, clear your head.”

When the back door slammed shut behind his father-in-law, Hawke fumbled for the phone in his pocket, his fingers trembling. His heart was thudding hard again, enough to make him weak and nauseous. He hadn’t done anything that could be traced back to him; they had nothing to tie him to the CIA hack, and even his link to Anonymous would be difficult to make stick. Unless Rick said something. Even then, there was no evidence. Hawke had been more than careful.

But the feeling in his stomach wouldn’t go away. As he went to the bay window and looked out to make sure the SUV was gone, he listened to the ringing on the other end, over and over.

Rick didn’t answer.

The low rattling sound Hawke had barely heard over the cries of the infant through the computer speakers came back to him; now he realized that the huge metal door had been descending, the noise neatly hidden.

Vasco went to the second set of interior doors that led to the main hospital, pushed on them, pounded his fists. Locked up tight.

They were shut inside like rats in a maze.

Hawke’s head spun and his legs threatened to give way. What Young had told him was washed away by the image he’d just seen on the screen. He could still hear Sarah Hanscomb or Price pounding on the loading-dock door, a booming sound like distant thunder. Another wave of dizziness and nausea hit him, and he couldn’t catch his breath. He tried to remember whether anything else was different in the video image from his apartment, anything he might use to reassure himself or give him some kind of clue to what happened, but the spatter of what might be blood against the wall overwhelmed him. He couldn’t think straight, couldn’t seem to cut through this buzzing that was coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. The world was receding rapidly, his vision narrowing to a point as darkness closed in.

The lines of text had disappeared from the monitors. Young was still standing with her hand outstretched, her head nodding now, as if she were falling asleep standing up. The screens changed again. For a moment Hawke couldn’t make sense of it, and then he realized he was looking at himself standing in the morgue next to Young, the two of them mirrored again and again across the room.

A fresh pang of nausea washed over him, along with louder warning bells, but he couldn’t seem to focus on them. Do something. The video footage was being shot from above. He glanced up and found the camera secured to the corner near the ceiling, watched it pan slightly as it zoomed in on his face. The image froze like a snapshot and code began to stream across the monitors once again, wiping it away. No, not code, exactly; there were letters and numbers mixed together. Hawke recognized his own bank account number, address, family names and Social Security number within it.

Fresh adrenaline flooded his system, and this time it brought rage along with it. Was it Rick? No, he wouldn’t do this. That seemed clear, even if everything else was rapidly disappearing into the fog that was settling over Hawke’s brain.

Them . Eclipse. That was what both Weller and Young had said. Someone in the company was stalking them and causing this disaster, for reasons Hawke still couldn’t quite understand. But they knew so much about him, his movements, his pressure points. How was that possible? He knew he wasn’t thinking straight, but he couldn’t help it. How dare you? You son of a bitch. Stay away from me and my family. He gave in to the feeling, let it lift him back up and give him strength. He picked up a stool that had been tucked under the metal table and threw it at the camera. The stool careened off the wall and knocked the camera loose, crashing down against a dissecting table and sending a tray flipping end over end to clatter on the tile.

The adrenaline rush was gone as quickly as it had arrived, leaving Hawke drained and woozy. He bent over, panting, hands on his knees, like Vasco had done. Vasco was now slumped on his side, head leaning against the locked interior doors. He seemed to be breathing, but slowly, his mouth slightly open.

The world bowed in and out like a funhouse mirror. Hawke thought he saw a line of code run right off the closest screen and onto another, bleeding and oozing across the surface like blood. For a moment, a shadowy figure congealed from nothingness, hovered at the edge of his sight, gone before he had the chance to make out anything else.

A third wave of dizziness washed over him, and he closed his eyes and fought down the urge to be sick. Images played through his mind like old films: his father’s woodworking tools sitting abandoned in the basement after his death; the faces of the CIA agents who had come to visit Hawke the day Rick had been arrested, twisted into some kind of ghouls without eyes, cheeks flushed pink; Thomas observing an ant climbing across a sun-dappled patch of floor, cocking his head like a curious puppy before tapping it, changing its direction and finally crushing it under his thumb, watching it twist and flip, anchored in place by the violence. Why it do that, Daddy?

They had been anchored in place now. This was a room for the dead. Hawke blinked. The refrigerated steel lockers loomed behind him, and he imagined their doors slowly swinging free, desiccated fingers clutching the sides of the opening as the things inside clawed their way out.

A room for the dead.

The vision was so vivid, Hawke almost believed it was happening. He had made the mistake once of watching an Al Qaeda execution video online, black-hooded executioners sawing at a man’s neck, and the true horror hadn’t been the images on-screen but the idea of what might have gone through the victim’s mind as he realized there would be no last-minute rescue. Hawke felt like that now: no escape from this place. Something about being lured in here, the deliberate nature of it, like a cat with a mouse: trapped by a monster without pity. Ants flipping and twisting in agony. The way a toddler played with something, discovering that others experienced pain, too. You weren’t born with empathy and compassion; you had to learn it.

Hawke nearly had something important in his grasp. The nurse in the hallway and the others in here, all dead without a mark on any of them. But the truth eluded him, no matter how hard he tried to grab it.

That acrid, rotten smell from the hallway was in the air again. He studied the walls, the equipment stacked neatly to one side, as if someone had tried to build a barrier against nothing; and then he settled upon two blue tanks sitting on the floor, silver valve at the top and a flexible tube looped around them.

Someone had brought these in here. A thought flickered through his wavering consciousness. Oxygen . That blue tank was oxygen, and oxygen was life. Whoever was stalking them, they couldn’t account for his creativity, resourcefulness, everything that makes us human. He had to outmaneuver them somehow, find ways to surprise them.

Next to him, Anne Young threw up across the tile, yellow bile spattering as she fell hard to her knees. It reminded him of the night Thomas had gotten sick for the first time, less than two years old, crying out in terror as Hawke had made his bleary-eyed way through the dark to his son’s room. Thomas was sitting up in bed with his lion, fever-wet hair plastered to his forehead, and as Hawke had sat on Thomas’s bed to console him the boy had leaned over, eyes wide and bewildered, and vomited into Hawke’s cupped hands.