Torch Passing

They warned her all the time. It wasn’t enough to be cautious, skeptical in the beam of peace strife to death with a tension tenuously amorphous lurking behind corporate meetings and political discourse. At least water is still affordable, technically. Her many Careers since joining the bureaucracy to maintain such a teetering balance of the remaining United States have been growing in intensity. With a hand-delivered envelope stoking paranoia that would call for a report and alert, it becomes a faded distilled truth from the Career of a nameless co-worker. So she tidies up her daily security blockades, passwords, new mother’s maiden, throw the sim card away, and get a new phone entirely. Its front read, ‘Taste their blood for sight,’ and inside, on a single index card, it read, ‘change my code for best results,’ written in lavender matching the tab as the rest was a Matte black, nearly soft like velvet. The notable smell left her re-feng shui-ing her loft until, after an hour or two, the aroma brought a pause, with a location that could not be named but held such a place in her mind, not distinctly from what, but the mood it exposed to her conscious that says this problem must not persist. Step by step, like a navigation system via heart-pounding memory revitalization, revealing streets, mile markers, and settings somehow updated with the current disaster aftermath, but how she saw this left her with regret brought from a flashback. Who’d ever consider reverse engineering paper, and despite its texture, that’s all it was, to explain an origin of a place long dead, long gone, yet historically unforgettable? It’s no wonder she waited a week to plan the trip.

Tammy’s only real gripe regarding her closest friend holding out of her super cool, secretive job in the Partnership was the tight-lipped way she described the juicy details of her spy life. The couch she crashed on was nicer than the full-sized bed locked in the tiny studio she has with locks that don’t recognize her keys anymore. Cleo felt she made a great house sitter even while giving her free range over her heart-healthy snacks and master bath, but the rice cakes call for some serious renegotiations. Only if Tammy wore the same size six, so she’d have free range of the closets, too, she’d joke. However, watching the formal suitcase get exchanged for a tactical backpack preloaded with the standard bug-out essentials; passports, multiple currencies, black and red med-kit, flashlights with backup batteries, and rope. The extra clothes and bathroom utensils were just to deal with and would be no less the three days of travel. Tammy had witnessed this level of disregard for refolding shirts that don’t make the cut, and an omen fell over the scene of Cleo’s rushed packing. None of the lustful blouses or heels to really sell the naughty investor role.

“When’s your next week off because this one was a jip? You missed last night’s Night Shade premiere,” Tammy asked.

“This is a little different for a Career thing—”

“Then how long will we be gone?”

“Don’t know.”

“Don’t Know? That’s it?” Tammy caught the glimmer of metallic unsheathed from under her black V-neck, lacking the attention to wrinkles Tammy always had a new joke for. Leaving clothes fresh from the dryer on the couch for a week at a time was one of Cleo’s only real gripes. The smile Cleo shot on her way to the front door as she morphed the act of getting dressed into a slick traveler’s trick while making off with the fool’s money left Tammy’s mouth agape, reveling in her unhinged concentration steaming toward the door. “This is different; you’ve gotta give me something. I saw the gun.”

“Don’t let petty boredom get you shot from a position while sleeping in my bed.”

“All right, damn!” Tammy said, plopping down on the sofa.

Cleo checked her tone at the moment Tammy showed the defeat she appeared to be becoming further nonplus about, like a bratty kid of a poor single parent. It didn’t stop her from grabbing a ball cap and hugging her goodbye with an “I’ll be right back. It’s an in-person reset, nothing more. It’s empty, by the way. The fear is enough for me. Remember, if anyone asks--”

“I Don’t know where you went or if you’ll be back.”

“And if they can’t give you a proper spelling?”

“Distract and slam the door; lock all locks. Is it like your Career account—”

“Love you.” Cleo let the door slam after a blown cliff.

As far as Careers go, the clandestine delivery system was a revolting exercise that put her entire life choices up to scrutiny. Drops, pickups, all done by people like Cleo fresh from a Career or turning one down, if applicable. Door-to-door data farming for new digital currency was only meant to be an abundantly forward ruse the folks could use against one another, but the information is only step one. The doors are commonly labeled with a cheesy pun meant to serve as a budding enterprise, and most who answered were often ill-prepared for the likes of her. Fun aside, that was the point. Paper trails go as far as the skill of embezzling will allow so confident want-to-be experts to return to physical evidence to give attorneys breathing room during a recess. She’ll keep you clean or feed you to your competitor’s prosecutors, operating blindly and borderline independently with AGent providing the time and information of back alley deals in boardrooms down the hall from the CEO’s office. The perks of corporate espionage, except for her incognito organization, kept away from the voids on either side of feuding quadrants of the continental US in preference of an aspergillus hiding between three rotten systems.

A fellow member of the Partnership, Bradly, received a similar envelope that at the time meant nothing but now hit kin to exchanging a Tempur-Pedic for hot coals box spring for her bed of nails. As forbidden as it is to confirm anything from the Partnership with another Career freelancer, all he could confirm before disappearing a day later was that it was disconnected from the Partnership’s objective. While most letters came with an apparent Y or N and the no coming with instructions to pass along the Career, his, like hers, cruelly gave no such thing. How close it was to a standard slip didn’t make any sense if it wasn’t them, which may have been why she hadn’t seen him in sixty days as of yesterday.

The place lies in Maryland, one of the epicenters of the invasion of 2020. It was a place she once spent time recovering while hiding from the de facto rule of the American, Russian, and Chinese governments, combined to restore civility if not the land of the free and the home of the brave. Most of the east coast was rubble acres intermingling with bought lines used for resources and further development if the population grows to support such an area. The site of a great battle and the beginning of the shift in America’s recovery from the ashes of sleepers ripping apart the treasury, executive branch, and the majority of congress. The only famed altercation that survived the eighty years of spotty history-keeping came in the form of a poem written ten years after that goes as follows:

‘Lines of green and black played soulfully

Beneath the snitches table.

If someone had read the label

A fable good as gold, sold by the gods of old the artifact,

It tripped the live wire wild card,

Unyielding, misled dead, defending the

Red Herring perpetrator.

The arrows flash, slash by, all sides, an

Assault in the skyscraper.

Command change in the strange

frontier, no more lies, and the Native Vixen flew.

Along with the furious offender.

Coincidently, the former head, and astronaut of all things, died at her desk, clutching the poem in her rigor fist thanks to a massive heart attack. All the other information on drives, in files, was gone when her body was discovered the following day. If her death was sudden and surprising, could she have organized it prior? A mystery that can still send a cold twinge down the back in the proper context.

Arriving on the cusp of familiar sights that sat in her head as unstrapped boxes in a moving truck, she waited for it to stand and warm her anxiety with nostalgia and, in turn, some clarity. But it was all new. She couldn’t remember the initiation that put her in touch with the AGent and signed the contract, yet the clear recollection of a morbid prophecy of her death stating she’ll die where she started radiated like a migraine of a budding horn, hoping she’s the one outlier. It had something to do with those earning the accolades for a promotion. She had never met the enigma but hadn’t stopped receiving messages since. What bothered her most, after being scrubbed as useless and, quote, ‘disappeared’ involved her refusal to kill, which she’d expressed multiple times with rejected Careers. During those horrendous times, which the citizens called the retethering, she was seconds from the subjugation spearheaded by an alliance, now defunct, granting her the freedom worth the risk even if she didn’t quite notice at the time. This brought another theory.

As far as disappearances go, a beginning of a new theory was interrupted, reaching a gate she’d be scaling with her lightened backpack. A loose map of the Hospital campus she dug up while looking for another way in joined her pistol, the envelope, and a list of rooms this Career could involve or a clue to where I might really be to shorten the search time. A hospital buried in the once carved-out forest occupying over an acre of immersive shade and nibbling deer getting its fill twenty feet from the ambulance round-a-bout. Now, an inch or two inside. Taking that into consideration, its prime healing days were at minimum fifty years earlier before the Great Red Wood sprang from the basement bursting from the ground-floor cafeteria through the fourth-floor psyche ward. It began to look like the hospital from those stories about the Winter Dragon’s murder theater. A legendary tale told at sleepovers of the soothsayer that took on the conflict’s initiator to save Ruby of Wind City. Given the first trap, she sprang when a shoulder hit a beam of light from the sun, and the bones the light made grittily glimmer; she could now give it real consideration as possibly true.

Traversing the jungle halls was a class four hike she pioneered, heading up first, then descending lower and lower into the bowels of the structure amid Gaia’s digestion process of human architecture. She struggled in the sunless day to decipher deliberate branches protruding from tiles, floor, and ceiling and the types of apparatus that put bear traps in the same box as a mild inconvenience. Webs on top of webs strung from pediatric oaks burst through the windows marking a trap that claimed the life of someone still dangling by the foot amongst the vines.

*SWOOSH*

To be taken out by such a classic would’ve done more to her psyche than brain damage. Studying the intricacies that almost cost one life, no refunds, was straddled between being jammed into the overgrowth after it reached maturity and overgrowth carrying it into position to launch on its own. “They can’t all still be live, can they?” That aim was too good to be a total fluke, but one touch, and it fell from its position unhindered until the floor. There was a single electrical signal in the building pinging off a tower not far outside Baltimore City. You’d think they would still be inoperable, but somebody used it three minutes ago, so it’s habitable to someone. Maybe not the corpses getting fresher the closer to the underground levels. Possibly only dead three weeks when she found the first two stairwells blocked but about four or five days when she found Bradly rotting in shrubbery jutting from a wall. It appeared he was crushed by a landslide that broke through a janitor’s closet and tried to crawl out to no avail.

Of all the doors ajar or just plain gone, Cleo approached a steel sliding door coated in mossy moisture, slimy to the touch, green to a pukey fault, and black enough to deter entrance without the possible trap implication. Examining for something a little less Rube Goldberg with a mist for laser sensors and the tracker to confirm the location of the ping. She paused at an encasing, too filthy, rusted to have ever been used for decontamination, not that the bullet shower from two of the ceiling corners wouldn’t work in a way. When all else fails, kick some ceiling debris at it. Leg cocked, aim set just so, setting up for the follow-through and--

“It’s open.” The momentum was already too much, and it clanged inside. She pulled out her pistol to the words, “—just step over that,” referring to the bones piled inside. Stepping into the steel casket, finding it was neither a door nor held in place by anything threw her shoulder into it. The resulting earthquake rattled the observation room above the theater like the supports were an amalgamation of rubber bands, straw, and half-chewed bamboo. And it also triggered a TRAP!

*POW*

Cleo scanned the area twice beyond the old man, tinkering at his console with construction earmuffs. By the third round, the ringing in her ears relinquishes her hearing to the groans of a dying man. One through and through the neck shot continued to the guy behind him, hitting them center mass, center of the chest. The old man stated, “Good; that one only had about a day left.” He removed his muffs and flipped on the light on the table, finally adding more to the red glow from whatever screen glowed so bloody. “How could he work like this,” she thought. It was equally possible that he found the blue coat and cargo pants in such disgusting dismay but also likely, taking in the smell of BO, he wore them into the tatters that stood before her. Yet, flowing halfway down his back was the silkiest red hair straightened to a luster Tresemme would never reach, and is probably why they recently filed chapter 11. She couldn’t believe it was naturally sprouting from his dingy black forehead. He didn’t look or even turn around but said, “why are you still pointing that at me? You’re here; you won.”

“Did you—” she asked.

“No, and who might you be, Cleo? Because I’m a bit lost as to why those envelopes are everywhere and even you’ve brought one.”

“So, I’m—”

“What should have both of us pissing some life into this wildlife experiment is the—well—

*CLICK*

“—is yours accented like mine?” Her eyes needed a second to adjust to the brighter lights jerry-rigged above before examining eleven feet of wall covered in dry-erase scribbled floor-to-ceiling written in Sharpie. The exact moment she locked eyes with the turquoise and obsidian polestar (according to the notes surrounding it), a light bulb dropped from above. It bounced to a stop facing it head-on, warming the paper—

*SNAP*

“Give it a second. There’s another; hold on.” This black light slowly sank into position, revealing something on the tab beneath the visible D.A.S., labeling the front. Mine’s doesn’t have a sender—wait—”

“What number is on yours?” he asked. Pulling it out of her back pocket, she waved it around, hoping to finally get a face to the voice. Blindfold in all, he turned to face her, only off by eighty degrees. “It’s one, isn’t it.”

“Indeed, it is.”

“So, do you know them?” he asked.

“Is Das a company?”

“They’re initials; I’m sure of it now. I’m sure they intend to kill me.”

“Then where’s the concern,” she asked, undoubtedly coping with a sudden fatigue from nowhere.

“Shit, none of the organizations, under my expansive view, can say a thing about these assassination attempts. I can’t prove she’s fucking real but—SEE!? Like that, I’m always saying she, but I have nothing to show either or.”

“In a hole like this, you don’t say,” Cleo’s sentiment was the same, but she’d never say it like that.

“Forty years ago, maybe I had a hunch. Sixty, most definitely on their tracks. The globe has been combed through, resources I didn’t know I had, exhausted, billions subjugated, and yet here you are, another killer or betrayer.”

“I don’t kill. If you are whom you say you are, AGent, you’d know that. Do you know what the numbers mean?”

“Check those three’s envelopes down in the surgical theater.” He flipped on the house fluorescents hanging over the hospital bed, not that it was there. She put her shoulder-length brown hair in a ponytail. “I’ll be here with the light,” then pointed to the ladder. She considered the trap and kept one hand loaded with projectile led for predicting so much and climbed down. The floor was sticky with layers of decades-old, dried blood merging with the soil breaching with root systems cracking the foundation. The first man had it in his inside pocket. She raised to so his intense beam would highlight the number four. The second, she had to wipe on his clothes and ignore the soggy dripping to get a read of the number three, but she didn’t see the third, and she blindly assumed—

“Hey--Hey, you’re alive, right? Stay there; it’s been days!” Nothing would have stopped her from sprinting toward the salvation of an ended isolation. They were worse off than the old man and a limp she tried not to acknowledge as they hurried down the corridor. There was quite a momentum behind her when she clipped a wheelchair that caused a stick or a broom handle to rise high enough to sweep the leg and put her stumbling neck first into a noose trigger by her reach to brace herself on a gurney. The counterweight dropped, and the jolt snapped every prospect of an after-death twitch and a single crack. A mechanism Cleo felt wholeheartedly flabbergasted by, leading to a violent scream in her palms.

“Would you believe I truthfully only prepare sixty percent of these traps, tops? Take your time.” And wait for the swinging to slow she did. She couldn’t tell whether he stared at the corpse swinging or was too blind to know where he was, but his nonplus nature permeated regardless. It took a few precautionary pokes before she found the envelope.

“Two, and I have one. I don’t—”

He removed the ladder leaving her trapped unless she was willing to try her hand at that hallway. “What’s supposed to happen?” he asked.

“Not so fun not being ahead of every—AHH!” She had no idea why she said that. Cleo was fighting to stay on her feet amid the pounding in her head, drowning out all her thoughts.

“If D is detective like I’ve theorized, peace would keep whatever it was away. But the number started with 4123. And you’re it, baby. I’m too old for the runaround.”

“I don’t feel right. Just let me out!” she yelled in agony.

“I don’t know what I did or to whom. The closest was this guy talking about a dead curly-headed redhead, but I was at war for fifteen years. Stuff like drinker and always armed got thrown around, but I put the entire globe in transparent houses of cards. I’ve seen every plan to overthrow, and major crime is gone, but they're just throwing my lackeys at me. My poor employees.”

“So that’s how you hid.” She wanted to pull her hair out to feel anything but the rewriting of her body, her consciousness, all while facing AGent with a piercing red flare stare, no pupil to speak of.

“No.” Maybe it was the smile or the sudden bushel of locks, but Cleo stopped looking like Cleo. “What are you?”

The morph was ugly, and neither could accurately describe it. She felt her skull stretch, skin, all seven layers, turned to glass and chipping off, starting with the pistol she couldn’t stop tapping on her forehead. She sank a few inches into her shoes, and her light brown skin turned pale. “How’s your memory? You getting a vision yet?” She said amid gritting her teeth.

“All my visible futures, and you think I’m in touch with a past of any kind. This isn’t you, Cleo.”

“And I’m not whoever the hell that is—

*GET OUT! GET OUT! *

“Are you being possessed by a clown,” he asked, backing towards his dry-erase boards.

The foamy convulsions ceased and left her hyperventilating on her knees, but SHE recovered where Cleo couldn’t. Something was dragging the pulsating ethereal into the room, and it was impossible to miss. “I remember you now. Oh, I got it right this time.”

“That’s right, Mr. Fury.”

“You died. You’re—you’re not from here; you can’t be real.”

Cleo’s final help me fell out of Alice Scarlett’s mouth while she lit her cigarette.

“I thought you were like the others. Impossible solid figments of me—they didn’t belong--”

“None of them were from here. Your “illness” went unchecked, and they all died for you. Four thousand-one-hundred- twenty-three different dimensional implications wiped. I won’t count mine. Don’t get shy on me now. You weren’t that day.”

“It was a biological attack--it was WAR. I wasn’t warned; no one knew, not even the RCK,” he said

“You don’t think I see this—set up? What made me different?” SHE asked. He cowardly, clumsily sank behind a roller chair just out of sight of her more diminutive stature. “Couldn't imagine the strain of a crossing of that magnitude, some firing back, others one-hit wonders, others cannon fodder, but I land on a battlefield, get used as your human shield, and tossed aside, and you didn’t remember my face. Despite putting your fucking hand all over it.”

“You’re a creature of some kind—an apparition stealing a human look from some poor woman. It doesn’t matter whether from birth or not; I don’t care.”

“Mr. Fury, I don’t have to see you to hear your lies.”

He crawled along the wall toward the steel slab and the opening it brought. Meanwhile, SHE pulled a freshly loaded pistol out of her waistband and checked a Glock from her back just in case. She cleared her throat before his brink for it, and he stopped. The best he could do was face his demon hallucination, ignoring his instincts, so he stood the fastest his tired old knees could, awaiting the small-statured woman to finish her drags. “You want to know? I’ve had time to think, obviously. But Cleo goes free, unharmed, when you’re done.”

“Someone has to fix this mess, right?” she asked.

“Unharmed, Deal?”

“One last good deed, huh? It’s respectable, relatively speaking, Deal.”

Cleo was standing over his bullet-riddle corpse, puking first from the experience and second from the blood-gargling AGent struggling with the metallic taste she couldn’t shake, hands soaked in red. She was alerted by the cell phone on the console; his. He was tapping the board with the last of his arm’s functionality under his envelope, taping bluntly. It was AGent’s regularly scheduled ‘Would you like to Reset your password’ screen asking for the current one. As he faded, he feverishly apologized, over and over, while pointing frantically to the envelope on the wall, the only area of the board unscathed, including the body-shaped outline where he stood punctured by high-powered rounds. “I said to leave you unharmed. She wasn’t supposed to—she shouldn’t have…. I’m sorry….”

Gazing at the blinking line, understanding what he was trying to point to, she opened the letter and put it in, struggling to see through the burn in her eyes. Flashes of intrusive, unexplainably detailed thoughts made keeping her eyes open like staring at the sun with lime juice hitting the retinas. “Has he known the whole time?” she said aloud. Unlocking the phone’s messages, most of the device was news alerts running from the globe for anything, everything. After finding nothing but Solitary and pinball with a four billion high score on the hard drive acting as a wall, she was flabbergasted as to how he could possibly do what he did with a cell phone in an abandoned hospital with no WIFI. But her reflection took all of that away. Her face was covered in blood, and none of it hers. The metallic taste made slightly more sense, but why she would shower in it, she didn’t get it. It was smeared, war-painted in her eyes and lips like she celebrated the kill and can now admit was finished with her still empty weapon.

Suddenly, she received messages for the AGent. The first was a question. “Does the Japanese prime minister receive the package in good health before the merger,” to which she replied, remain steadfast; the coup dies down in three days. She knew. How did she know? They kept coming as she watched herself, hour by hour, day by day, for years and years, answering the texts of individuals she didn’t know but knew, never met but could walk them through a soapy supreme car wash without feeling a drop. She received a call from Tammy. Service alone was impossible, so telling Cleo that she gave her this number blew her mind. Cleo unfurled her trip and the tragic ending she couldn’t believe. To hear her calming reassurances before telling her she can never leave put tears, clearing strips of her skin in the blood down to her neck. More years of orchestrating Careers for employees she’d never meet. Every thought of leaving brought war to the surface, plaguing not only the US but the planet, barely clinging to the stalemate to keep the resources spread evenly.

Then she was back.

Her fingers in her mouth, just dipped in his blood, still kneeling in front of a dying AGent. Her pupils flickered onto amber fluorescents clear in the screen’s reflection after hearing the ringing phone. Fifty great nations now relied on the Partnership to balance the perpetual Cold World War, and she was alone. His apology and why his last words were written in Sharpie behind his head as he slumped over. “I curse you, Detective Alice Scarlett.”