S Huang - Zero Sum Game

He looked confused for a moment, which made a hot spurt of anger rise in my chest. He didn’t deserve to forget them. But then he blinked, and looked at me, and faltered. I wondered what my face looked like. “We couldn’t risk Pithica finding us,” he tried to explain, the words thready.

I’d known, or suspected it strongly enough that it was the same thing, but I still felt dizzy, as if every bit of equilibrium had deserted me. “You killed two people I liked,” I said. My voice sounded like it came from very far away.

“I—I’m sorry,” Steve faltered. “It was one of our routine measures; we weren’t trying to—and I only signed off on it; I wasn’t the one who—” He stopped abruptly, confusion and guilt flaring in his eyes, as if only just hearing what he had said, that he was trying to excuse being the one who gave the order by virtue of having kept his hands clean. His mouth worked silently. Then he gathered himself, lifted his chin, and did that nose-looking-down thing he seemed so fond of. “I am not going to apologize,” he said, firming his voice. “We thought it had to be done.”

“So does this,” I said.

I didn’t move as fast as I could have. I wanted to see his eyes widen in startled realization in the split-second before he died.

The body slid to the ground with a quiet thump, and I took what felt like the first clean breath since this had all started. Pithica might not go in for revenge, but I sure as hell did.

The odd jobs I’d been able to hustle as LA recovered dried up as we hit the second week out from the disaster—people weren’t desperate enough anymore to hire me for necessities, and were still too occupied with rebuilding their lives and routines to worry about trivialities. Arthur had gone back to his own place, leaving me alone with too many thoughts—about Dawna and Pithica, about what she had been able to do to me, about Rio and whatever he hadn’t told me. When I slept it was fitful and at odd hours, and the rest of the time I drank. A lot.

A week and a half after our final confrontation with Pithica, I got an email from Checker saying he’d been keeping tabs, and as far as he could tell, over seventy percent of Pithica’s revenue sources had moved their money out of the organization’s reach. Dawna and her people would need a long time to rebuild those resources. We had knocked them down but good.

I spent a lot of time staring out at the streets wondering when I would see crime start to spike. And then I drank some more.

I woke sober one evening, vivid dreams chasing a blurry reality, scenes so real my brain wobbled for a few seconds before settling on which world was the correct one. Nightmares had plagued me for as long as I could remember, but they had been worse these past couple of weeks.

Since Dawna.

I lay on the blankets and tried to latch onto the shreds of the dream, an intense feeling of déjà vu overpowering me. Places, faces—they wavered just out of reach, the itch of forgotten memory overwhelming my brain and twisting my stomach until I tasted bile at the back of my throat. Whatever had crawled through my subconscious last night, I had seen it before.

Or dreamt it before.

Dawna’s face intruded in my mind’s eye, backlit by forms and figures I didn’t want to see, scenes half-forgotten, visions and memories and a world only half real—

Pain in my knuckles slammed the images away. I’d put my fist through the drywall next to the mattress.

I wiped blood and plaster dust off the back of my hand with my shirt and dragged myself out of bed to find more alcohol. The bottles from the night before—or whenever I had last been awake—were empty, expanding in a glass forest across table and floor and attesting to my usual company.

Halberd.

I picked up a bottle with a stylized drawing of an axe on the label.

Halberd. Why had I just thought that?

The word pinged me like a fragment of another forgotten dream, a half-buried shred of awareness.

Halberd and Pithica, the memo had said, the one Anton had given me a lifetime ago. But no, something else—the word poked at me, itching, an irritating nub that wouldn’t go away, echoing against the edges of my mind.

An echo in Dawna’s voice? Her image swam in my memory, standing tall above me, blurred in a thousand pixelated layers. Her hands on my face, reaching into my brain—I could hear her voice, but the words overlapped in a jumbled mass.

Was I remembering something she had said while we were fighting? As she was shattering me?

Fear clenched at me. I started digging through the mess in the flat for a scrap of paper, tossing bottles and food wrappers and dirty clothes to the side while I repeated the word in my head over and over, afraid it would fade away again before I snatched the chance to write it down. I found an old envelope and a half-dried ballpoint and scribbled faster than I could form the words in my head:

HALBERD. THIS MEANS SOMETHING IMPORTANT. FIND OUT.

The sentences floated in front of my vision: mad, mocking, absurd. They meant nothing.

Stupid. I crumpled the envelope in my hand.

Then, for some reason, I smoothed it back out and put it in a drawer. Halberd did have something to do with Pithica, after all; Anton’s memo had shown that much. Foolish to think it was anything more than that, and I wouldn’t be able to look into it anyway after what Dawna had done, but still…it had to mean something.

For some reason, I shivered.

I needed a drink. Yes. Large amounts of alcohol sounded perfect right now. Something in me needed to get royally drunk and pass out for about three days. Good plan.

I grabbed my keys and headed for the door. I yanked it open to reveal Arthur, his hand raised to knock.

“Arthur,” I said, surprised. “Hi.”

“Hi, Russell,” he said.

We stood awkwardly for a moment.

Arthur waved a hand apologetically. “Tried calling.”

Phones. Right. I felt around in my pockets and found my latest cell phone. A blank screen stared back at me, and I vaguely remembered getting annoyed with the ringing a few days ago and turning it off. I hit the power button and saw a message proclaiming fourteen missed calls.

Oops. “Sorry,” I said. “You need something?”

To my surprise, he chuckled. He had a very handsome smile. “Russell, you remind me of someone I knew once. Someone who’s a damn smart cookie like you, and almost as prickly.”

“Huh?”

“Mind if I come in for a minute?”

“Sure, whatever.” I let the door swing all the way open and led the way in to flop on the saggy couch. Arthur sat down next to me. His eyes took in the forest of empty liquor bottles, but he didn’t say anything, and I told myself I didn’t care about his opinion anyway. “So? What’s up?” I asked.

He looked like he was searching for words. “Checker’s back,” he said finally. “Just been to say hello.”

“Oh,” I said. “Good.”

“You okay?” he asked. Oddly, he sounded like he cared about the answer. In fact, I was struck with the strong impression that he had come all the way here to…well, to check in on me. What the hell?

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Really?” He laughed a little hoarsely. “’Cause I ain’t.”

Was he trying to confide in me? “I guess I’m just waiting for life to get back to normal,” I said. It sort of already was, for me. Except for the dreams. But maybe those were normal, too. I was having trouble remembering.

“Ain’t worked any case but this in six months,” said Arthur. “Gonna be weird, going back to doing background checks and divorce cases.”

“The exciting life of a private eye?” Boy, was I glad I didn’t have his job.