Shadow Walker

Time Passes

At some stage that night, he must've fallen asleep because the next thing he knew, sunlight was streaming through the window and heating the stone wall opposite. Sour-eyed with the brightness, he thought for a second he was in Quarry Cove, cozied up in his East-facing bed, relishing a few bonus minutes of sleep before having to get into the grain truck and drive it around after his step dad. The whimsy ended when he tried to sit up and the motion struck the nerve in his shoulder, reminding him where he was.

He took measure of his body, noting a brick numb right leg and a fly attempting to make a refuge in the hollow of his right ear. Mosquito bites ringed his fingers, hot and itchy, getting worse the more his languid body woke and his blood began pumping. But they were nothing compared to the painful bruises that had matured during the night—one on his hipbone, which he could feel digging into the waistband of his suit pants, and one on the side of his head, somewhere between his temple and crown. All-in-all, he felt exactly how one should expect to feel after jumping from a moving train and spending the night sitting on the cold, concrete floor of a three-and-a-half walled shelter in the middle of a field.

As his eyes adjusted to the sting of light, he blinked and took measure of his surrounds. Rain was still in her stretcher, in the same position as before, eyes closed, hair splayed about her head, hands resting on the soft rise and fall of her chest. Next to her, an empty space where Teegan should've been was now occupied by a duffel bag, gaping open at the zipper and spilling hardware guts.

He struggled to his feet, ignoring his aches and pains to stagger from the stone shelter and into the field beyond. The vastness gave him pause—daylight exposing great swaths of sun-parched grass, rolling and dipping with the undulations in the earth and rising into charcoal blanketed hills where a controlled burn had singed off the dead catkins and excess bunny tail grass. If he followed the horizon to his right, and held up a hand to shield his eyes from the sun, he found where the railway met the murky blue sea and joined with the hazy skyline. A full 360 and the highway stretched, quiver straight toward the city, which flickered like a mirage beneath an orange-pink smog.

But no Teegan.

Dec stood for a while, scanning the road, the field, the hills until his eyes watered from the strain. Closing them, he let his face fall back so to soak up as much of the sunlight as possible, groaning when he found himself unsatisfied as skin to a tepid bath. He tugged at his shirt buttons, itchy with the need to submerge himself further, and undid them one-by-one until the light touched the pale, sun-starved skin of his chest. He was about to unbutton his sleeves too when something dropped from the left arm hole. He caught it between his thumb and forefinger just before it hit the ground.

It was the trackpad. He'd forgotten about the trackpad.

With shaking hands, he raised the device to the light, checking for damage. Miraculously, it seemed to have survived the night without so much as a scratch. Unrolling the flexiglass, he touched the top right hand corner of the screen to turn it on, slick-fingered with the apprehension of what he might find. There was a long, dreadful moment where Dec thought it wouldn't work. Then, the screen flickered to life and clarified.

A bar appeared and above it, the words:

Heat signature required.

He blinked rapidly, as though the interference of his eyelids might miraculously change the cast of those words, but they remained stubborn-set as hieroglyphs upon a crypt, their meaning clear. You shall not gain entry without the correct password, written in the correct hand, with the correct pressure and heat imprint of the owner's touch. Dec poked the screen anyway, inspiring the appearance of another alert:

Signature void. Security shutdown enabled. Try again in five minutes.

He cursed himself for being so stupid. Of course it wasn't going to be that simple to break into a government certified device. Of course it was going to be filled with all kinds of locks and landmines. Lazar had led him on a wild goose chase. He'd risked everything for a useless piece of glass.