Hellbent

For a moment Evan couldn’t find his voice. Then he forced out the words. “Tell me where you are, and I’ll come get you.”

“It’s too late for me,” Jack said.

“If you won’t let me help you, then what are we supposed to talk about?”

“I suppose the stuff that really matters. Life. You and me.” Jack, breaking his own rules.

“Because we’re so good at that?”

Jack laughed that gruff laugh, a single note. “Well, sometimes we miss what’s important for the fog. But maybe we should give it a go before, you know…” More screeching of tires. “Better make it snappy, though.”

Evan sensed an inexplicable wetness in his eyes and blinked it away. “Okay. We can try.”

“Do you regret it?” Jack asked again. “What I did?”

“How can I answer that?” Evan said. “This is all I know. I never had some other life where I was a plumber or a schoolteacher or a… or a dad.”

Now the sound of a helo came through the line, barely audible.

“Jack? You still there?”

“I guess… I guess I want to know that I’m forgiven.”

Evan forced a swallow down his dry throat. “If it wasn’t for you, I would’ve wound up in prison, dead of an overdose, knifed in a bar. Those are the odds. I wouldn’t have had a life. I wouldn’t have been me.” He swallowed again, with less success. “I wouldn’t trade knowing you for anything.”

A long silence, broken only by the thrum of tires over asphalt.

Finally Jack said, “It’s nice of you to say so.”

“I don’t put much stock in ‘nice.’ I said it because it’s true.”

The sound of rotors intensified. In the background Evan heard other vehicles squealing. He was listening with every ounce of focus he had in him. A connection routed through fifteen countries in four continents, a last tenuous lifeline to the person he cared about more than anyone in the world.

“We didn’t have time,” Evan said. “We didn’t have enough time.”

Jack said, “I love you, son.”

Evan had never heard the words spoken to him. Something slid down his cheek, clung to his jawline.

He said, “Copy that.”

The line went dead.

Evan stood in his condo, the cool of the floor rising through his boots, chilling his feet, his calves, his body. The phone was still shoved against his cheek. Despite the full-body chill, he was burning up.

He finally lowered the phone. Peeled off his sweaty shirt. He walked over to the kitchen area and tugged open the freezer drawer. Inside, lined up like bullets, were bottles of the world’s finest vodkas. He removed a rectangular bottle of Double Cross, a seven-times-distilled and filtered Slovak spirit. It was made with winter wheat and mountain springwater pulled from aquifers deep beneath the Tatra Mountains.

It was one of the purest liquids he knew.

He poured two fingers into a glass and sat with his back to the cold Sub-Zero. He didn’t want to drink, just wanted it in his hand. He breathed the clean fumes, hoping that they would sterilize his lungs, his chest.

His heart.

“Well,” he said. “Fuck.”

Glass in hand, he waited there for ten minutes and then ten more.

His RoamZone rang again.

Caller ID didn’t show UNIDENTIFIED CALLER or BLOCKED CALLER. It showed nothing at all.

With dread, Evan clicked the phone on, raised it to his face.

It was the voice he’d most feared.

“Why don’t you go fetch your digital contact lenses,” it said. “You’re gonna want to see this.”

2 Dark Matter

Five Days Earlier

The burly man forged through fronds and the paste of the jungle humidity, his feet sinking into Amazonian mud. A camouflaged boonie hat shadowed his face. A cone of mosquito netting descended from the hat’s brim, breathing in and out with him. The ghostly effect — that of an amorphously shaped head respiring — made him seem like a bipedal monster flitting among the rotting trunks. Sweat soaked his clothes. On his watch a red GPS dot blinked, urging him forward.

Behind him another man followed. Jordan Thornhill was gymnast-compact, all knotty muscle and precision, his hair shaved nearly to the skull, a side part notched in with a razor. He’d taken off his shirt and tucked it into the waistband of his pants. Perspiration oiled his dark skin.

They’d left the rented Jeep a few miles back, where dense foliage had finally smothered the trail.

They kept on now in silence, mud sucking at their boots, leaves rustling across their broad shoulders. Strangler vines wrapped massive trees, choking the life from them. Bats flitted in the canopy. Somewhere in the distance, howler monkeys earned their names.

Thornhill kept tight to the big man’s back, his movement nimble, fluid. “We’re a long way from Kansas, boss. You even sure this dude has it on him?”

The invisible face beneath the boonie hat swiveled to Thornhill. The netting beat in and out like a heart. Then the man lifted the netting, swept it back over the brim. Surgeries had repaired most of the damage on the right side of Charles Van Sciver’s face, but there remained a few feathers of scarring at the temple. The pupil of his right eye was permanently dilated, a tiny starfish-shaped cloud floating in its depths.