A room with cages.

  Big cages, too. Obviously remnants of the Old Zoo. I picture them being unloaded from an old traveling circus. The kind of cages that would have been filled with lions and tigers and monkeys, and whatever else traveling circuses brought with them.

  Of course, these weren’t filled with lions or tigers or monkeys—or animals of any sort.

  I almost pull back. I almost turn and get the hell out of there, as fast as I can go. I know the way out. I can cover ground pretty quickly, especially ground I’ve already been over.

  But there’s no way in hell I’m running.

  I scan the cages, I scan the men and women within, huddled and asleep, or drugged. They are mostly naked. Many are covered in sores. Many appear quite ill, and most are curled in the fetal position. I can’t hear them, but I suspect the few that are awake are moaning or calling out for help or weeping loudly. Also, two are dead. Just left there in the cages. I know they are dead because their forms do not radiate bright white light. Their bodies, much like the dead in the animals’ cages around me, just lie there, motionless, absorbing the vibration around them…not radiating.

  There are ten or eleven cages in view, with more, I suspect, just beyond my seeing radius. My brother isn’t in any of them. In the center of the room, between the rows of cages, there is what appears to be an operating table. I can make out feet. Male feet, I think. Strapped down. Tight.

  The room comes into sharper focus. The dead have been dead for a long, long time—way past rigor mortis or bloating—and well into decay. They are at the far edge of my seeing, but I can see the dried skin, and their skeletons just beneath. The more I look, the more detail I can see. And the deeper my vision seems to stretch.

  But I can’t quite see who’s on the table.

  Maybe if I stand here a little longer. Try a little harder. But the horror of what I’m seeing is challenging my ability to stay calm enough to remain in the Winter Wind. I feel myself wanting to gasp, but I don’t. I feel myself fighting to turn and get help, but I don’t, not yet. Mostly, I want to kick the door in and take out my badge and gun, and take care of business.

  But I had done that before, hadn’t I?

  I had. I had acted recklessly and now I am who I am, and my partner is dead, and the woman I have come to love is maimed for life.

  No kicking in doors. And no rushing around like a crazy man. Be calm, think, observe…

  There, on the table, I can now see a torso. A naked torso. I can see a stomach rising and falling rapidly. Someone is scared. And probably cold. I can’t imagine there are any comforts in this room of horror.

  Now a woman is rattling her cage, screaming, I think. She is responding to the person on the table, I think. They are both, I suspect, crying out. But their cries are falling on deaf ears, literally. And I suspect they are deep enough down and sealed away so that no one can hear them.

  I continue holding the doorknob, continue stretching myself to the limits of my seeing, the limits of my new abilities.

  But I can’t quite see far enough. Can’t quite see…

  Almost. Almost.

  And now, animals around me are chattering, shaking their cages wildly. From my peripheral, I see them going apeshit…crazier than they had even when I was approaching. The ground is veritably shaking. The figure on the table fights his restraints, fighting so damn hard I can see the blood around the straps cutting into him.

  He’s kicking and jerking and struggling—rocking the operating table…

  He fights just enough, rocks just enough, shifts the table just enough for his face to appear in frame, just enough for me to recognize my brother. It is the first time I have seen him in five years. He looks so different. Emaciated, terrified, hurt.

  Holy sweet Jesus…

  And that’s when the animals in my peripheral vision go ballistic, and I am just shifting my attention to them when I see something drop from the ceiling above, directly behind me.

  Another trap door, much like the one I had dropped into further down the tunnel.

  I turn—but not fast enough. Something heavy and blunt slams into my lower back.

  Chapter Sixty-two

  The force of the blow does not hurl me into the door; instead, it drives me to my knees.

  White, searing light—anything but the Winter Wind—explodes in my head and it’s all I can do to find my breath and cover my head at the same time.

  The weapon—a metal baseball bat, no doubt—comes down again, this time squarely across the middle of my back and I can feel my bones crunch under it. Several ribs, in fact.

  I am driven straight to the ground, straight to my stomach—and I curl in time to cover my head when the bat comes down again, this time across my upper arm and left hand. But the force is strong and true, and several bones in my hand shatter, I’m sure of it. But I keep it there, protecting my head.

  There is a good chance my arm is broken, too. I won’t know it until I try to move something, and right now, all I am doing is preparing for the next blow—and trying to breathe and trying like hell to figure a way to protect myself.

  But the blow from the bat doesn’t come. Instead, a kick is leveled to my midsection, but it doesn’t land true, and this seems to piss off the kicker, because he hits me twice more, rapidly, with the bat. Blows that hit my damaged ribs again, but also my upper back, knocking out what little air I had been able to recover.

  Another kick, this time leveled at my face. It hits me square and knocks my sunglasses off. A plastic shard, I think, has lodged deep into my empty right eye socket. And then, the bat comes down again, harder than before, and connects with my left shoulder, neck, and ear. I see more white light and feel the blood flow from my head, certain the blows have broken my humerus and clavicle.

  Mostly, I am certain the attack has rendered me nearly useless, not that I would have been any match against anyone in a fight, let alone someone with a weapon.

  I wait for the next blow, certain I am fading in and out of consciousness. And as I drift in and out, sputtering blue-green light appears and disappears. Briefly, haltingly, and even more amorphous and blurry. But it’s there, and as I lie in a growing pool of my own blood, I see the man, flickering in and out of my thoughts, approach.

  I see him reach a hand down…

  Now, I feel my head lifting, being hauled up roughly by my hair. Painful, yes, but the pain is barely a blip on my radar.

  More blue-green flashes…

  I see him lean down; he appears to be studying me closely. He is young, that much is sure. Maybe mid-twenties. Lean and roped with muscle.

  Darkness again, and now I can smell his breath and I can smell the disinfectant on him. He smells like an operating room, or a hospital, or a laboratory. His breath, blasting my face over and over, reeks of tobacco and halitosis. Bad breath is the least of my problems.

  Another flash of blue-green light as I slip a little more out of consciousness. My perspective is a little above and behind me. I seem to be looking down at myself. So strange…

  He’s holding up a flashlight, shining it straight into my eyes.

  More darkness, as I feel the rubber coupling of the flashlight probe around my eyes. He uses it to roughly lift a lid, which digs the embedded piece of sunglass plastic deeper into my empty socket.

  His hand shakes and air bursts into my face and, if I had to guess, he has snorted. Probably with some sort of derision or relief. It is a blind man wandering the hallway, after all. Surely nothing he should fear, right?

  There is a slight pause and now he releases his hold on my hair and my head slams down to the concrete floor. More bright lights erupt in my skull…and I black out…

  ***

  I awaken in darkness, alone and cold and certain I have been out for only a few seconds. But that’s the thing with blackouts: it’s hard to judge time, especially when one lives in perpetual darkness anyway.

  No, I think, not perpetual, and not any more. And certainly not if I keep taking his punches and blows.

  The next one, I’m certain, will kill me, especially with me lying here like a sitting duck.

  One chance. And one chance only.

  Where he is, I don’t know. Where I am, I don’t know either, but it feels like the same cold spot on the floor, the same metal wall against my back. I think one of my fingers is caught in a nearby metal cage. A miracle it hasn’t been gnawed off. At least, I don’t think it has.

  As I come to, the blue-green light erupts around me. I try to sit up, and when I do, searing pain shoots through me and plunges me back into darkness. Shoulder is definitely broken. Maybe my upper arm, too. And there is something seriously wrong with my hip. Something is broken there, I’m certain of it.

  I breathe and the Winter Wind returns. I find myself hovering above, looking down at myself. I see the blood now, sparkling like an effervescent fairy pool in the middle of a forest. Except this is a pool of my own blood, and it looks like it’s coming out of an ear and an open gash at the base of my skull.

  Dizziness sweeps over me as I find a way to my left hip—my good hip—and put my weight there. I can feel knives digging into my hip; shards of bone, I suspect. Sooner or later, one will puncture an internal organ. Then again, dying a slow death is probably not an option, not here in this forgotten tunnel.

  Unless, of course, I end up in a cage on the other side of this wall, or on a gurney like my brother.

  The crackling, snapping vibrations that are the Winter Wind reveal I am alone in the hallway. The animal cages are still around me. The animals are mostly going apeshit. The living ones, that is. I reach into my empty eye socket and pull free the broken plastic shard. As I do so, the Winter Wind escapes me again, and I am in darkness. I feel blood splash free from the wound. If I hadn’t already been blind, that would have done the trick.

  Breathe, breathe, and I am back in the Winter Wind. A glow from further down the hallway, back in the direction from where I came. The man with the bat is down there, beyond the limits of where I can see. He’s making sure I am alone, I realize. He’ll soon come back and finish the job, or drag me into a cage where they will do…what? I hadn’t a clue. Experiments, no doubt. Torture, maybe. But more than likely…

  More than likely, one clean shot to the head…and then feed me to whatever’s alive in the cages.

  The light in the hallway is getting brighter.

  The son-of-a-bitch is coming back.

  Chapter Sixty-three

  I move to sit up; the blue-green light winks out, and I am plunged into total darkness. I’m also left gasping for air and fighting through more pain than I think I can handle. I want to vomit and pass out all at the same time. But I fight through it, air blasting out through my tracheal tube, along, with, I think, blood. Lots and lots of blood.

  Punctured lung, for sure.

  My right hip feels ruined, shattered, useless, and so I do my best to shift my weight to my right leg, and I am mostly able to stand when I feel a disturbance in the air, the vibration of the excited animals.

  He’s back.

  And I know he’s coming at me, with the bat. One good swing will crack my head open…

  ***

  I stand there, breathing and bleeding and leaning to one side, and tell myself I have, at least, a small handful of seconds. He’s not here yet. But he’s crossing the small antechamber, and no doubt, raising the bat at the same time…

  I do my damn best to control my breathing, knowing that at any moment, the son-of-bitch could be on me, knowing that at any moment, the mother of all explosions is about to erupt in my head, knowing that at any moment, I will be dead. I stand there and breathe and the light returns, flickering around the edges of my consciousness, bright, blue, green, flickering, flickering…

  I see the glowing mass approaching me from the darkness, coming at me rapidly, something is on his shoulder, the bat…

  Flickering blue-green light, appearing and disappearing in my thoughts, bright one moment and total darkness the next.

  Too excited, too terrified, too much pain…

  The light returns and I see he has stopped before me. He cocks his head to one side, and then disappears again, and when he reappears in my thoughts—I see the bat jumping off his shoulders, coming around hard and fast, and directly at my head…

  And that’s when the Winter Wind winks out of existence.

  ***

  I don’t need the blue-green light to know to duck, and I do so now.

  Air whooshes over the back of my head. I stagger, gritting through the abysmal pain in my hip, certain I might fall at any moment, but praying like hell that I don’t.

  Breathe, calm, relax…

  The Winter Wind returns, this time clearer and sharper than before, and I see the young man regain his balance. He’d apparently put a lot of weight behind what he surely thought would be a killing blow. He regains his balance. A young guy, muscular. I imagine him hauling bodies in and out of here, transferring grown men—no doubt drugged—from cages to gurneys. Yeah, he could do it, especially with the help of a crazy old doctor.

  Mostly, though, he looks confused as hell. He hadn’t expected me to duck.

  Now, he is nodding and circling me, and I realize I have somehow staggered away from the wall and am standing more in the open.

  As he circles me, I follow him, shifting and turning my body, and this confuses him as well. Maybe he thinks I can still hear.

  Now he stops, realizing he is giving away his position to me somehow, and I am impressed that I have been able to follow him without slipping out of the Wind, without losing my meditative focus.

  You’ve done this before, I tell myself, remembering my time at the beach, my time practicing moving my arm and staying in the blue-green world of vibration.

  I can do this…

  He takes a step toward me, carefully, and I don’t move. He smiles and thinks he has me. He thinks I can’t see him—or hear him. He raises the bat and this time aims for a bigger target, somewhere around my mid-section.

  He swings, faster than I am expecting, but I am able to contort my torso enough that most of the bat misses. Enough grazes me to hurt, but nothing like before, and I show no reaction and regain my balance, even though the searing white pain knifes through my hip. My seriously damaged right hip.

  He stumbles again, and pulls up; I am relieved beyond anything that I have managed to maintain my hold on the blue-green light, this world of pure energy.

  Breathe, calm, relax.

  He is pissed now. He doesn’t understand what is happening. I can see that on his face. In his eyes.

  So clear. Everything, so clear.

  He comes at me, bat raised, swinging wildly, thinking he is going to damage me with brute force. No more sidestepping for him. No more near misses.

  He comes at me.

  I see it clearly, so clearly.

  I lash out, just as Jacky had taught me. I snap my fist out from my shoulder and put all the weight I can into it. The blow hits him straight in the face, over his right eye. It is a hell of a punch. Maybe the hardest punch I have ever thrown, and I watch calmly, quietly, serenely, as he goes down in a heap at my feet.

  ***

  I look up in time to see another man standing in the doorway nearby. An old man who is holding a gun.

  Something flashes to my right, something big and bright and faster than anything I’ve seen so far. It’s a blur of teeth and claws and fur. A big creature, and it slams into the old man.

  A super white explosion briefly fills my thoughts as the gun goes off, and now, the man is rolling with the animal, fighting it, but not winning. Definitely not winning.

  Something skitters across the floor, something small and radiating heat. I calmly pick it up, maintaining the Winter Wind…

  I hold out the gun before me, as my guardian angel pins the old man to the floor, teeth bared, and looking as frightening as hell. I would later learn there was another opening, a mere hole in the ground...

  God bless my angel.

  Chapter Sixty-four

  It is later, much later, and I am in a hospital, recovering from surgery.

  I have been slipping in and out of consciousness, in and out of the Winter Wind. In the room, I sometimes see nurses and once even a doctor. But always, always I see Rachel. Sometimes she is pacing. Sometimes she is sitting and texting. And sometimes she is reading on her Kindle. Often, she is just sitting there, holding my hand, watching me.

  Although I am only half-conscious, the clarity of the living vibrations around me is startling, and I can sometimes see clearly her many wounds. Wounds caused by me.

  In and out of consciousness.

  I am in no more pain; I can see the IV, and where my shoulder has been set and cast. I note I am leaning to one side, and I suspect some surgery had been done to my hip. Bandages and wrappings secure my torso and chest, and I know there is only so much you can do for broken ribs. They are often the hardest to heal, take the longest, and are the most painful.

  Oxygen is directed straight into my neck. My vitals appear strong, steady, and the nurses do not seem anxious or worried, and so I slip out of consciousness again, and again, throughout the next few days.

  And always, I awaken to find Rachel in the room or by my side.

  Always.

  I am barely able to lift my hand to sign: “Betsie?”

  She signs back: “I have her at my place. She’s fine.”

  ***

  I come to and see Rachel’s forehead pressed into the mattress, her hand holding mine. She is asleep, I think.

  I can see a bald spot now on the right side of her scalp, where most of the damage was done by the explosion. The bald spot has mostly been hidden with creative hairstyles and hats. The exposed scalp is badly damaged, her skin mottled and scarred and discolored.

  I reach out and cover the patch with my hand and hold her as I drift back into sleep…