Shuttered Sky

driver’s seat of his Durango. For a hazy moment he remembered an accident. Squealing tires. The shrieking of metal on metal. The car wasn’t damaged in the least. In fact, it was sparkling new, right down to the new-car smell. There was a pain in his left side, and he looked down to find a serrated blue flag protruding from a small brown blood­stain on his shirt. He tugged it out, grunting at the pain as a large needle slid out from between his ribs. It was the kind of tranquilizer dart they used on animals, and no one had bothered to remove it.

It was dawn. He was alone in the car. Okoya was outside leaning on the bumper. Drew opened the door and stepped out into a muddy field, about thirty feet from a two-lane road. The last thing he remem­bered for certain was driving that road, but now the car was in the field, which was scarred with deep gouges between himself and the road. Drew felt his stomach begin to contract again but this time he fought the nausea down.

Okoya spared him a quick look, then returned his gaze to the Eastern horizon, where the sun had yet to make an official appearance. “I was wondering when you’d come out of it.”

“What happened?”

“You died, but it didn’t take,” Okoya said. “So they tranquilized you.”

“Who?”

“They knocked me out also, so I can’t be sure.”

“And the others?”

Okoya pointed. “That way.”

Drew squinted, but saw nothing but the road and fields beyond.

“Don’t bother trying to see them, they’re too far away for that, and moving quickly. I can barely detect their presence at all.”

“We’ll go after them,” Drew said.

Okoya slowly turned, his head rotating with the eerie smoothness of an owl. His eyes were dilated. “We won’t do anything.”

“What do you mean?”

Okoya advanced a step, and Drew took a step back. Those eyes were more than just dilated, they were piercing and predatory. Drew had seen Okoya take on this countenance before. When he was hun­gry. Okoya came even closer, and Drew backed up against the car. Drew could see a flash of red deep within Okoya’s dark pupils. He wanted to run, but the sedative had turned his legs to rubber.

“Dillon isn’t here to protect you,” Okoya said coldly. “And the next time you die, he won’t be there to bring you back.” Suddenly Okoya’s hand was at Drew’s neck, holding him pinned against the car. Paralyzed by fear, Drew couldn’t move. “Therefore you will get into your shiny new car, you will drive me to the airport, and then you will drive yourself back to your beautiful home on your beautiful beach.”

“I . . . I can’t do that,” Drew said.

“You can and you will.” Okoya tilted his head slightly, studying the apertures of Drew’s face, almost as if he zeroed into the pores of his skin. “The consequences of not leaving now, Drew, could be . . . severe.”

Okoya sniffed the air around Drew, as if smelling the scent of Drew’s soul on his breath. And then he backed off, his demeanor changing, his hunger reined in. “You’ve helped them all you can. You can only be a hindrance to them now.” Okoya opened the driver’s side door for him, “Go home, Drew. Put your affairs in order.” Then he went around the car, sliding into the passenger side, and waited.

Drew didn’t know whether his fear or his anger was more powerful at that moment. He wanted to bail on the entire thing. Leave Okoya and his car, and run. But he didn’t. Instead he got in the car, and started it up, riding the rough course back to the road.

“You’ll find them?” Drew asked as they turned onto the road. “You’ll help them do whatever it is they need to do?”

“As my survival depends on it, I assure you, I’ll do my best.”

“You’ll need cash,” Drew said.

“I can find what I need.”

“What are you, so powerful that you have to make things hard on yourself? Open the glove compartment.”

Okoya pulled open the glove box to a clatter of cassette tapes.

“Now find the one labeled ‘Eddie Money.’ '

Okoya pulled out the Eddie Money cassette box and opened it to reveal a roll of bills instead of a tape.

“There’s more than a thousand dollars there,” Drew told him. “Take it.”

Okoya considered the roll of hundreds, and slipped it into his pocket, saying nothing.

As they got on the Northwest Parkway, heading toward DFW, Drew dared to ask the one question that had been on his mind since he stepped into the car. “Tell me one thing; you had every opportunity to take my soul back there. Why didn’t you?”

Okoya chuckled bitterly. “Are you worried I’ve acquired a human conscience?”

“Have you?”

Okoya’s voice grew cold again. “Your friends know the look of me when I’m well fed. They are more likely to trust me if I stay hungry. Otherwise I’d be here talking to your soulless shell.”

He said nothing more. And after Okoya was left at DFW curbside, Drew took the first highway west, flooring his accelerator to 95, openly daring any cop from Texas to California to pull him over. But none did.

* * *

Dillon’s sense of hearing was the first to return. A high-pitched hiss and a deep rumble in his ears resolved into the atonal groan of an engine. He was wrapped in a cocoon. No. Not a cocoon; a shell. It was a sensation familiar and unpleasant. Deja vu washed through him, leaving him nauseated. He opened his eyes to a narrow swatch of vision; a horizontal strip of light, and when he tried to turn his head to see more, he found his head would not move.

He was back in the chair.

After all he had endured, he was seated once again in the infernal device that had held him in check in the Hesperia plant. For a moment he felt he was back in that awful place, but in a moment he realized that this couldn’t be the same chair—it was a duplicate—and the slim image before him was not that of his cell. There were several plush leather chairs in his field of vision. One held Winston, another Tory. No doubt Michael was there as well, somewhere out of his limited range of sight. They were slouched, unconscious, their hands and an­kles in shackles—bonds far less elaborate than Dillon’s chair, but then the others didn’t need the complex restraints that Dillon did. Beyond the chairs were several small oval windows in a curved wall. They were on a plane. A private jet.

Someone moved into his line of vision. A pair of familiar eyes peered in at him, heavy with sympathy, and Dillon looked away, not wanting to meet those eyes.

* * *

As Maddy crouched, looking in on Dillon through the face-plate of the restraining chair, she was filled with a strange aggregate of emo­tions. He was once again helpless, a victim of circumstance, unable to effect his own destiny. But this time she was not his lifeline to the world, she was one of his captors. There was sorrow in this, and yet it was seasoned with a comfortable sense that things were as they needed to be. Things were best this way with her outside of his face­plate, looking in. He would need her now. Need her to explain, need her to calm his angers and fears. Dillon, she had decided, was at his best in chains.

“You’re awake,” she said. “Good. We were hoping your tranks would wear off first.”

She got down on her knees to stay in his line of vision, and when he closed his eyes, she took his hand, gently, lovingly massaging his fingers. She could feel him try to pull away, but his wrist was shackled to the chair.

“Listen to me, Dillon,” she said. “This is not what it looks like.”

“No? You’ve kidnapped us, and locked us up. That’s what it looks like. Is there something I’m missing?”

Maddy sighed, still holding his hand. “We had to. You were . . . you were out of control.”

“Out of whose control?”

Maddy found herself angry at his bitterness. “Don’t throw this back on me. You were the one who left without a word.” He had promised to be back, hadn’t he? Instead he left, abandoning both her and Tessic, forcing them to become allies in corralling him again. She looked to Tessic, who stood silently behind Dillon, out of his view. Yes, Dillon had brought this on himself by his own irresponsibility.