Jay Posey - Three

Three held the chemlight outstretched; scanned the couple huddled against the wall. He could barely see the kid, tucked in there between the wall and his mother, but he could see enough. Wren’s eyes were open wide, staring, not even squinting against the sudden flare of Three’s light. Jaw clenched, oblivious to his surroundings: catatonic. No way to tell if the kid was even still in there anymore. Three shook his head.

“I’m fine,” Wren said in the barest of whispers, unblinking. “Is the other one still down here?”

Three glanced to Cass. She looked just as surprised as he felt. Three grunted, frustrated with himself. Surprised could get you killed.

“Other one?” he asked.

Cass shook her head.

“That one…” Her eyes flicked to the dark heap by Three’s feet for a hint of a second, “…passed us once, but came back.”

Three caught a motion out of the corner of his eye: the kid, shaking his head ever so slightly. Not openly defying his mother. Almost to himself. Like he wanted his mom to be right, but knew she wasn’t. He just kept staring straight ahead.

“Wren was sleeping,” she offered, gently combing his hair with her fingers. “Maybe he dreamed it.”

Wren’s watery gaze shifted to Three, and Three got the sense the kid knew something. He didn’t push it.

“OK,” he said, with a slight conspiratorial nod to Wren. “Well. Let me take care of this.”

He kicked at the unmoving remains of the Weir.

“Then we’ll see what we see.”

Three hooked the chemlight on his coat, letting the light fall across the Weir’s remains. Cass inhaled sharply, hand reflexively shooting to cover Wren’s eyes. She’d never seen one up close before.

It might have been a man once, long ago. A man dead of starvation, left exposed in some frozen desert where rot had never touched the corpse. The skin was green-gray in the chemlight, stretched tight like a drum over its skeleton, with hardly enough apparent muscle to animate the bones. Its hands lay curled like dead spiders, each of its knotted fingers sharply tipped with what looked more like talons than nails. The neck ended abruptly just above the shoulders, and seeped a pungent, viscous fluid; the source of the chemical odor. Its head… well, there was no sign of that.

There came the quiet swishing sound of steel drawn across fabric, and Cass realized for the first time that Three had been wielding his short blade, and was only now sheathing it. He hooked his forearms under the Weir’s armpits without any apparent revulsion, and dragged it further down the tunnel, away from the stairs. The scraping sound of the corpse across the concrete grew fainter and fainter, and at last faded to silence. Cass felt fear creeping up on her again, never having noticed its absence in the first place.

“Don’t worry,” she said, after a while. “He’ll be back.”

She told herself she was comforting Wren. The darkness stretched time, made it difficult to judge whether it’d been five minutes or twenty.

“He’ll be back,” she repeated.

“He’s a good guy, right?” Wren whispered.

“What, sweetheart?”

“He’s a good guy? He’s not going to hurt us?”

Cass hesitated for a bare moment, brushed her fingers through Wren’s hair, soothing.

“Don’t worry, baby,” she answered. “I don’t think he’s dangerous.”

“He is dangerous, Mama,” Wren replied, with unusual certainty. “But he’s good, right?”

There was something in the tone, something deeper behind the question, but it was a something Cass couldn’t puzzle out. She put her hand on his cheek. It was cool, clammy; wet with tears. He was trembling.

“What is it? Wren, what’s wrong?”

He didn’t answer, except with a labored sob, one he’d been trying to hold back. Panic surged up in Cass’s chest: a crushing, nameless fear for her child.

“Wren, baby, what’s going on? Just talk to me.”

He struggled to speak, mouth working without words. Finally, he forced a whisper through his constricted throat, reluctant: part confession, part nightmare.

“I can’t feel him, Mama.”

Cass pulled out the chemlight and ignited it to get a good look at her son. Instead, she let out a yelp.

The man was there, crouched at the alcove, looking back at her.

“Sorry,” he said flatly, almost at full voice, which seemed to roll like thunder down the concrete tunnel. If he’d heard what Wren had said, he didn’t make any sign of it. And he didn’t seem that concerned about Wren’s state. Nothing unusual about a child being comforted by his mother in the dark.

“You want to move?” he asked.

It took a moment for Cass to find a reply, there was so much her brain was trying to process.

“What? Oh, uh,” she stammered, and inhaled, drawing in foul fumes that stung her nostrils. “Can we?”

“Yeah,” he said. “There’s another alcove just a little ways down. Come on.”

He reignited the chemlight hooked on his coat, and scooted back, while Wren crawled out, followed closely by Cass. A dark pool of viscous chemical fluid spread from the entry of the alcove, and trailed off in a wide swath further down the storm system.

“Don’t worry,” Three said, seeing Wren’s wet eyes on the streak. “We’ll go down the other side.”

Cass held Wren’s hand tightly as Three led them down the corridor at a confident pace, without any noticeable concern that more of the Weir might be around. Even walking in their little bubble of light, she felt the yawning blackness pressing down on them: weighty, draining. By the time they reached the next alcove, Cass couldn’t have said whether they’d walked for twenty meters or two hundred. And she realized she was weary enough for it to have been ten times as far. Three crouched at the entryway, looking under the stacks of pipes that covered the top half of the niche, and then motioned them in.

Cass nudged Wren in ahead of her, crouched, and followed closely behind. Wren moved to the back while she settled into one corner. Once seated, she motioned to him, and he flopped into her lap, closing her arms around himself, as if wrapping himself up in a blanket. Cass hugged her son close, and extinguished her chemlight.

Three watched them from the entryway, noted the almost ritualistic nature of their movements, their postures. The way Wren nestled into Cass, how she rested her cheek atop his head. Three guessed the woman and child had spent many nights just this way, sleeping in some abandoned building or alley.

“Will you sleep?” Cass asked, raising her head slightly.

Three shook his head.

“You go ahead and rest, ma’am. I’ll keep an eye out.”

Cass nodded slightly, and resumed her posture, closing her eyes. Three watched her for a moment. Ragged, weary, she looked suddenly vulnerable. Fragile. And the boy. Three looked to him, and glimpsed the boy’s eyes shutting suddenly. The eyelids fluttered. Pretending to be asleep. Three smirked at that.

He turned his back to them, and sat cross-legged at the mouth of the alcove. He drew a deep breath, then switched off his chemlight; allowed himself to be swallowed by darkness. Silently, so as not to disturb the woman and child, he drew his pistol and laid it in his lap. Three didn’t expect anyone, or anything, to find them down here, but the familiar weight of the gun was reassuring. He reached back, unsheathed his blade, rested it over the top of the pistol. His own ritual. He steeled himself, set his mind and will to staying awake in the long and silent darkness.

After a moment, a breathy whisper sounded behind him. The boy.

“What’s your—?” he started, then caught himself. “My name’s Wren. What’s yours?”