CHAPTER 2

 

Vincent Malone was late for work. Normally, a little tardiness wouldn’t have bothered him. After all, his was a dead end job, meant to fill the hours and cover the rent on his studio while he pursued his real goals. Over the past few years, he’d delivered pizza, drove Uber, and cashiered at a couple of big box stores. Now, he was delivering for Wang’s, a popular Chinese joint just outside of downtown Vegas. Delivering food to sweaty, beady eyed dudes and drunken coeds wasn’t exactly the kind of job that couldn’t bear to wait an extra five minutes while he hopped in and out of the shower. But somehow, despite his best efforts, he’d gotten emotionally involved.

He tried not to let anyone get too close. Although it might sound melodramatic, he knew that he was quite literally a time bomb. At some point, the past would catch up to him, and he didn’t want anyone caught in the crossfire. So he kept everyone at arm’s length, moving from job to job and city to city as the whim caught him. And he knew that he should have left Vegas months ago, but he couldn’t hurt Jin like that

It bothered him to be five minutes late. How in the hell was he expected to give notice?

He tried to call the restaurant again, but of course the line was busy. Jin probably had orders coming out her ears. She had other employees, of course, but they were notoriously unreliable. Vincent had quickly learned how to step in and help wherever he was needed. He’d take over the cash register or man the phones between orders, because otherwise she wouldn’t sit down for a single minute all day long. At her age, he wasn’t sure how she did it.

Skipping the shower was tempting, but he couldn’t show up to work smelling like he’d been working out for the past hour and a half, which he had. A shower wasn’t just a luxury. In this case, it was a necessity. He’d just have to jump in and out as quickly as possible, and try Jin again on his way across town.

He shucked off his sweaty clothing with a sigh of relief and took a moment to look himself over in the mirror. His skin was so pale it practically glowed in the dark. He did not look like the kind of man who lived in a desert climate. Between the skin and the white-blond of his hair, he looked Scandinavian. But his appearance gave no other clues to his origins, just like the other thousands of times he’d stared at himself like this. For some reason, he just kept on doing it. And now he was wasting time when he was already late. He pushed himself away from the vanity and stepped into the shower stall, berating himself for stupidity.

The water came on, lukewarm at best. But it felt great after working himself to shaky-muscled exhaustion. Salty sweat ran down his face as he rinsed off hurriedly, reaching down for the bottle of Head and Shoulders. Dandruff probably wouldn’t show in his light-colored hair, but it was his one vanity. Long and smooth and straight. He went the extra mile to take care of it.

He was just straightening up with a pool of shampoo held cupped in one hand when the vision hit.

They always started the same way. After a disorienting rush of movement, his eyesight would clear, and he’d hear a voice. It said, “They must be stopped.” Over the years, he’d concentrated on that voice, trying to figure out something—anything—about the speaker. Were they male or female? Was it coming from a particular direction? Could he perhaps spot the person who directed him? He’d tried, but to no avail. The voice felt almost mechanical, like someone had made their best attempt at programming a human voice into a computer. It was neither the high pitched voice of a woman, or a man’s deeper tones. It had no accents, except for those vaguely halting mechanical speech patterns. It sounded like it was projected from invisible speakers in the world’s greatest surround sound, only no one else in the visions could hear it but him.

No one could see him either. He’d experimented a few times, trying to call out or tap people on the shoulder, but nothing happened. Oh, he could move about at will, and he heard his own voice, but he couldn’t even see his hands. They passed through anything he tried to touch. He was nothing but an invisible ghost here, only able to watch and listen as the voice picked out his next target.

He took a moment to look around, knowing that the voice always gave him a minute or two to orient himself before the target appeared. He was floating in an airport terminal, right next to a newsstand full of magazines announcing the latest celebrity breakups, advances in space technology, and the newest diet trends which would almost certain contradict all of the old diet trends. Hurriedly, he looked around for some kind of identifying characteristic. Which airport was this? What terminal? The first few times he’d had the visions, he’d spent so much time shouting questions at the voice, trying to figure out who it was and what it wanted from him, that he’d been unable to find the target despite his best efforts. He shuddered as he thought of what had happened afterwards. Finding the targets was his only option.

After he’d floated a ways down the terminal, he saw the signs. Las Vegas International. Terminal B, between gates 5 and 7. He’d have to buy a ticket to get down here, and that would stretch his already tight budget to the limit, but he would make do. What time? A few more moments of searching finally brought him to the departures sign and the time in the corner: 5:47. He winced. Right in the middle of the dinner rush. Jin would let him go—she always did—but he hated to think of what his absence would do to the evening rush. Perhaps he could get someone to cover for him. Or maybe he would luck out and get a delivery somewhere near the airport. He could swing by, do the job, and be back before anyone realized anything was wrong. If worst came to worst, he could claim car trouble. Not the best of plans, but it would have to do.

Hurriedly, he returned to his original spot beside the magazine rack. The voice always picked the right vantage point, and if he wasn’t in the right place at the right time, he wouldn’t spot the target. They weren’t surrounded by amorphous halos or pointed out by floating neon arrows, although he’d told the voice once or twice that it sure would be handy if that could be arranged. Sometimes, there was only one person in his vision, and then selecting the right person was easy. Others, he had to use his wits to pick the right person out of the crowd. That would certainly be the case this time.

No sooner had he returned to his spot next to the stacks of People and Cosmopolitan than a man rushed by. The rushing wasn’t notable—this was an airport after all—but this man kept looking behind him as if expecting pursuit. He wore a nervous, harried expression, and his hands kept clenching and unclenching in what seemed to Vincent like a nervous tic.

“That one?” he asked aloud, knowing that the voice would confirm when he got the right person.

“They must be stopped,” said the voice.

He looked a bit closer, trying to memorize the man’s features. He was in his early thirties at the most, with dark curly hair and the kind of sleepy good looks that women seemed to really like. His dark coloring suggested Greek origin, maybe, or Italian. Vincent thought his clothing suggested success—that watch looked real, and his shoes were the kind of fancy leather that Vincent had never been able to afford. At least not as far as he could remember. Then again, he wouldn’t have wanted those shoes anyway. You couldn’t move in them, and he needed to move swiftly and silently.

The vision began to fade, and he relaxed a bit, knowing that his work was at an end. But wait a minute. Hovering just on the other side of the target was a shadowy figure the likes of which he’d never seen before. He couldn’t make out any details, no matter how hard he tried. The vision blurred at the edges, and he tried desperately to hold onto it.

The voice said, “They must be stopped.”

It had never repeated itself a third time in all the years he’d been doing this. How many times had he had these visions? He hadn’t kept an accurate count, but he figured one or two a month for the past seven years. The voice hadn’t deviated in all that time, no matter what Vincent had done. What did it mean?

“Wait, which one?” he shouted desperately. “The man, or the shadowy figure? I couldn’t even see their face!”

But the vision continued to fade, and the voice said nothing.

“Please! I want to do the job, but I don’t know what it is! Which one?”

But it was gone, and he was back in his body again. Water sluiced over him as he slumped on the floor of the shower, a blue streak on the tile where the shampoo had trickled out from between his fingers. His knee ached, probably from the fall. Usually, his visions came when he was meditating. It felt like the voice had decided to throw him at least one bone. He might be an amnesiac loner with uncontrollable visions, but at least they didn’t come when he was driving. Or showering, usually. But this vision had been notable for a lot of reasons, and the timing was only one of them.

He climbed painfully to his feet and washed his hair with slow deliberation, trying to unpack what had just happened in his head. The voice always spoke right at the beginning of the vision, and then when he looked at the target. Perhaps it meant that he was supposed to target them both? But that would be difficult, since he hadn’t been able to see anything at all about the shadowy figure. It was humanoid, but he couldn’t even tell if it was male or female. And something told him that a wavery shadow figure wasn’t going to be standing in the middle of Terminal B at the airport.

There would be no way to know for sure. He would just have to go to the airport and watch for the target he knew. Then he’d see if anyone was watching the Greek man. If worst came to worst, he’d just start barging into people rudely, waiting to see if his touch would take hold. He’d never had two targets before, but surely no one would blame him even if he was running into people. He could just go up and down the terminal, pretending to be late. No one would realize anything was off about that, even after two of the people he ran into fell over and died.

He stepped out of the shower amidst a billow of steam and wrapped a towel around his slim hipped waist. He couldn’t remember where he came from. Any family he’d once had had disappeared into the recesses of his mind, and no amount of meditation or hypnosis had managed to bring them to light. Searches of missing person’s reports on the internet had turned up empty. He was no one. He was the angel of death, and he would hunt down the people the voice pointed out to them, and his touch would end their lives. If he didn’t do it, bad things happened. His targets would kill or maim or hurt other people. He shuddered again, thinking of the havoc those targets could wreck in an airport. If he didn’t get there in time, if he failed to find the shadowy figure, they could take down an entire plane. All of those lives lost, and he would be—at least in some part—responsible.

His eyes fell on the clock as he stepped out of the bathroom, and he swore loudly. He’d forgotten all about work, and now he was really late. Angel of death or not, he had to make money to live, and Jin was counting on him. She didn’t know what he was, and he would never tell her. But she’d taken him under her wing like he was her own son, and he couldn’t let her down. Even if he didn’t need the money, which he did.

He pulled on a pair of jeans, his legs still damp from the water. They clung to him stubbornly, refusing to be pulled on. Like they knew he was already later than late, and they were determined to make things worse. Jumping up and down did nothing to fix the problem, and it made his knee hurt. He’d probably grow a nice colorful bruise after that fall, but there was nothing to be done about it now. At least the voice didn’t expect him to fight his targets. All he had to do was touch them, and if he happened to try the wrong person, nothing happened except that they often looked at him funny.

All in all, it was a pretty foolproof system except for the fact that he had no idea why he’d been chosen for the job, who the voice was, or who he was. He had no idea how his touch killed. His victims all had heart attacks, but how? He never felt anything when he touched them. No electric shock to stop their heart, or a zap of energy or…anything. He just touched them, and they died. The first couple of times it had happened, he’d been terrified of touching anyone ever again, but it only ever worked on the intended targets.

At least there was that safety net to keep him from messing up. And in this situation, where one of his potential targets was entirely unknown to him, he was going to need it. He finally managed to button his pants and pull on a shirt. Within minutes, he was out the door.

He had things to do and people to kill.