TITAN

The dark green hull of the plane made Jim McNulty feel sick. It was the color of pea soup vomit and battle fatigues. Everything else on the plane was green too: the uniforms, seats, boxes, and netting. But it probably wasn’t really the color making Jim sick.

No, Jim was sick because he was just letting it happen.

Behind Jim, two grim-faced men sat with rifles in their hands. Their uniforms were unmarked without names, ranks, or medals. They might as well not have existed. As far as the military was concerned, they didn’t. Faceless men. Phantoms.

Jim had never ridden in a military transport and, if he ever had a say in it, he never would again. The passengers sat in what amounted to a wide, long, open cylinder. For some reason, it reminded Jim of a cigar holder with seats and cargo. Considering the circumstances, that thought seemed silly.

Silly.

Being silly.

It was a luxury he didn’t have anymore. Jim wasn’t sure he would ever be silly again. Not now. Not since…

God, I hate my parents.

If they hadn’t shipped him off, this wouldn’t have happened. He would be at home hunched over his computer watching something stupid on “YouTube.” But no. He was on a C130 flying from Wyoming to Washington, D.C., under cover of night. Was it night? He wasn’t sure, but it made sense. These people did everything at night.

A few fucking C’s and off to Wyoming. Off to this. To these men. To the Shadow Man. Maybe Jim would have worked harder in school if he’d known this would happen. Though, he doubted this was the deterrent his parents had in mind. They probably thought he’d get structure and discipline. Jim got plenty of both.

He also got injections.

Every Tuesday, five o’clock… what were they for?

“Just a flu shot, son. There’s a nasty one goin’ round,” the old man in the scrubs had said.

But that was a big needle. Jim had never gotten a flu shot from anything that big. It was like a dissecting probe. When Jim persisted, the old man just smiled, “We’re the Army. We do everything big, son.”

At that, Jim had laughed. The old man had an easy way about him. He’d never given Jim his name or anything but shots, but he was kind. None of the other cadets got their shots from him, though. Just Jim. Not that he had noticed anyway.

Jim was so blinded by loneliness and anger that he never questioned the needles too much. It didn’t occur to him. Not right away. Besides, he saw cadets in and out of the medical office all the time. Why would he get special treatment? Somehow, the stress of being three-thousand miles away from home and away from his friends, his girlfriend, his bed, and his car left his mind feeling like Swiss cheese.

Or was it the shots? What were they giving me?

Jim didn’t think anything was wrong until one night weeks after he had started getting the shots. It was just before Christmas. He had felt feverish and his joints ached all day. Between classes, while walking in the hall, his legs crippled him with pangs of agony and drove him to the floor. The pain was beyond anything he’d ever experienced, but it was gone as quickly as it came. Later, with a clearer mind, he thought it felt like extreme growing pains.

Like my bones were ripping apart…

A man had helped Jim to his feet almost instantly. Jim had never seen him before.

Where did he come from? Was he following me?

Jim never did see his face. At that point he was still seeing red, his skeleton throbbing with heat and agony. Simply moving felt like grinding glass shards in his limbs. The edges of his vision were rainbow colored explosions. Whoever the man was, he took Jim to the old man again.

Did he work at the school?

No, Jim didn’t believe that. Not now.

“A bit o’ nausea hit you, son?” The old man asked while producing a small needle.

Jim could barely talk. Was someone else in the room? The pain rankled his senses and he couldn’t focus. He couldn’t see into the back corner, which was shrouded in shadow. Was someone back there? All he could manage was, “N-no… not naus…“

“Oh, don’t be afraid o’ needles, sonny. You’ve had worse. This one’ll fix ya right up,” the old man said cutting him off. But Jim didn’t mind. Whatever the shot was, it felt like liquid heaven. Jim actually felt it hit his veins and move into him. He would have drunk it if he could’ve. Cool and soothing, it washed through his system, seemingly in an instant, leaving him just a bit high.

The pain had never come back so sharply since that day, but Jim felt other things. His stomach rumbled all the time, even when he wasn’t hungry. His knuckles cracked without provocation. His elbows and knees were always tender. But not the joints—the bones themselves. If he simply bumped himself on the edge of his cot, it felt like he’d been hit with a bat.

To top it off, they hadn’t let him go home for Christmas. The administration claimed it was a policy for new cadets, but his roommates told him it was the first time they’d heard of it and most of them had been at the academy for years. Jim pressed it with the administration, but he was turned down. While pretty much everyone else had gone wherever they called home for the holidays, Jim was stuck with all of the bad eggs and the old man. The shots continued over the holiday. Yay.

In early March, the Shadow Man had been in the office with the old man. It was the first time that Jim had ever seen him. Even then he could feel something off about him. Jim couldn’t quite put his finger on it. The Shadow Man stood, like his moniker suggests, in the back of the office, in the dark. But it wasn’t just that. Jim called him that because everything about the man was under the surface, in the shadows. He betrayed nothing.

The old man was still his usual, amenable, pleasing self, but he seemed slightly on edge. It was barely perceptible, but Jim had gotten to know the old man’s mannerisms pretty well. He was trying to be less gentle than he usually was.

The old man knew the Shadow Man was watching. It worried him.

One day when Jim entered the medical office, the old man wasn’t there. Just the Shadow Man. He sat comfortably on the edge of the exam table with one leg up. His right hand rested on the raised leg. Even in the light, the Shadow Man looked dark. Jim saw his face but could not recall anything remarkable or significant. He was average looking. All Jim could say was that the Shadow Man was maybe in his fifties and took care of himself. His hair was salt and pepper and his face was only just beginning to show age and wear. He wore a dark gray uniform with no rank, no name, and no medals. He might have been the janitor for all Jim knew, except that he was sure this guy was in the service. It was his close-cropped hair. Jim’s initial uneasiness faded.

Until the Shadow Man spoke.

“Do you know Eric Steele?” Jim had been so shaken by the question that he only later processed the faint accent. He wasn’t good with accents; Jim narrowed it down to European, not French, not British. It was barely noticeable under Shadow Man’s strong tone.

“What?”

“Eric Steele,” the Shadow Man repeated. “Do you know him? And his father?”

“Yeah, I know them… what’s this about?”

The Shadow Man sighed. His face nodded to the floor and his eyes searched for something that wasn’t there. At the time, Jim thought he was thinking about how best to put what he wanted to say; now he knew that the Shadow Man was calculating. He stood up from the desk and Jim saw how tall and broad shouldered he was.

Jim waited for an answer that wasn’t forthcoming. The Shadow Man eased over to the table where the old man had always gotten his materials. There was gauze, Band-Aids, cotton balls, antiseptic, and now the Shadow Man’s gloved left hand. Something was wrong with it. It was stiff, lifeless.

“Cadet, I’ve taken a special interest in you. I know from your records here that…”

Jim interrupted, “Uh. My records? Who are you?”

The Shadow Man went on as if Jim had never spoken. There was calm in his dark face and in his movements. Jim got the feeling that the calm was carefully orchestrated.

“I know that your grades aren’t strong. I know your parents shipped you away after years of underperforming. And I know that out of every cadet who’s ever come here, you’re the only one who made it through the first week’s calisthenics without collapsing. You didn’t break. Not once. But what I know that you don’t is that you didn’t do that because you’re very fit. No. You did it because you’re pissed off,” the Shadow Man said with a smile. Jim just stared and watched him ooze across the room.

“Anger is a good motivator. Fear’s better. And rage is the best. Most of the heroic war stories you’ve ever heard were not really smart, skilled soldiers coming up with a great plan. Not at all, no. In war, a man is stripped to nothing. He has himself and whatever’s inside. Those “heroes” were just regular men who had just seen their best friend’s face get splattered all over the ground. They saw women and children cut down. Some were wounded—even just slightly—and it set them off. The common denominator in all of them is rage. Not anger. Rage. Anger means you might start a fight or, hell, even kill a man. But rage? Jim, those folks finish the fight. They don’t just kill a man, they destroy him. Beat him to a pulp. Stab him fifty times. Shoot em’ a hundred. Whatever. I’m a colonel and I’ve seen it time and time again.”

Colonel… of what? Army, Air Force, Marines?

“What does this have to do with me? Or with Eric?” Jim sounded small. He couldn’t help it. Something big was happening—something out of his control. Why was some guy with no name asking about his best friend at a military school across the country? He had a million more questions to ask, chief among them: Who are you? Why are you doing this? But the questions stayed trapped behind his lips.

The Shadow Man saw right through him. Jim was pissed off. In other people, a heart beats in the center of their chest, but a white hot furnace burned where Jim’s should have been. Every day, every hour, every minute in Wyoming only made it worse. More coal in the fire. More gas in the engine.

The Shadow Man’s lips spread into a smile. The smile of a man who thinks it’s funny when a dog gets run over and doesn’t die right away. Dangerous. Confident. He knew he had Jim.

“Everything,” the Shadow Man said. “You’ve got rage, dontcha Jim? You feel it right now. You hate this place. You hate the people that sent you here. You hate everyone who’s not here. Like Eric Steele. So you do know him.”

“I don’t hate Eric. He’s my best friend. I’ve known him since we were kids,” Jim said. The words felt hollow on his lips. His attention turned inward to the stoked flames in his chest. The fire burned hotter. That’s the truth… right?

“But he’s not here. He didn’t have to be… initiated like you did.” The Shadow Man’s voice was barely a whisper now, but Jim shrank from it like a shout.

Jim glowered. “Initiated? They didn’t get me. The floor sergeant had to tear ME off of THEM!” He shouted but didn’t mean to, it escaped. The furnace belched flames. The heat consumed his memories.

“You almost killed those boys.”

“Those BITCHES. Bitches, not boys… pussies.”

“They came for you at night. I read about it. They came and tried to wrap you in your blanket...”

“They didn’t get the chance. I had stripped one of the metal bars off of my cot when I heard about ‘initiation.’ Hank Peters got it right in the face.”

“He almost lost an eye. You broke his nose.”

“Fuck him.” Jim spat. His face was now twisted with the memory flashing in his mind’s eye. “They were gonna wrap me up and beat me. BEAT ME? I BEAT THEM. Hank never saw it coming. But John and that pussy, Brian, tried to run. They did half the work for me. I chased them after kicking Hank in his balls. John runs like such a bitch. I caught him by the neck and steered him into the wall. I smashed his head on the corner of the doorway. It clonked. It actually fuckin’ clonked, like a cartoon. And Brian…” Jim’s hands clutched an invisible metal bed strip as he recounted the story.

Jim snarled. “Brian slipped out and down the hall. I chased him, but the little cunt is fast. Was fast. I give him that. I do. I didn’t even think. I just threw the strip. I threw it like a fuckin’ spear. I angled it so that it might catch him in the back of a leg, but it worked even better! It sliced right between his legs and tangled his feet. It was like a fuckin’ movie. He fell right on his goddamn pussy face. The BITCH!” Jim laughed now. “I couldn’t have planned it. I felt like fuckin’ Batman. I ran him down. The little fuck was trying to crawl. And do you know what he said to me? Do you know what he fuckin’ said?”

The Shadow Man didn’t listen to Jim’s story. He only listened to the raging fire crackling in Jim’s chest. “What’s that?”

“He said, ‘You’re not supposed to fight back. No one fights back.’ Can you believe that?” Jim grabbed an invisible phantom, clutched in tight fists. The Shadow Man watched Jim blossom. “I smashed his face right into the floor. Lil’ bitch was crying and I said, ‘I fight back. You’re lucky I don’t kill you, you sonofabitch.’ But I jumped on his back and beat him with my bare hands. I bashed his head and hit him and punched him and kicked him and spat on him…”

Jim froze.

He’d been so deep in the memory. That awful, terrible memory. He didn’t hear the small whisper vibrating up the back of his neck: you’re giving him what he wants… He looked down at his hands, clenched into fists. His knuckles were white from squeezing so hard. He looked from his hands up to the Shadow Man’s gleaming face. Jim thought about the story again. He couldn’t believe he had done it. It was like a monster took over his body. The monster beat those kids. Not me, it was something else… But he remembered liking it. I am the monster.

“That boy is still recovering. The other two were removed from school,” the Shadow Man said.

Jim spoke without effort, seemingly without sound. “I got off because my parents threatened to sue over the academy’s history of violent initiations. Admin kicked them out and kept me…”

“Of course. You defended yourself.”

The furnace cooled. Jim found himself standing amidst the ash. “I went too far… I beat them…”

“They would’ve done the same to you. Wrapped in your sheets. Alone, in the dark. They would’ve beaten you like you were nothing.”

“I almost killed that kid.”

“It was justified. Who could blame you? If someone hurts you, they deserve justice.”

Jim paused. He rolled the word “justice” around in his head. Justice? That wasn’t justice. He knew it. But he liked it. Every minute of it. It felt like justice…

Somehow Jim knew he’d do it again.

“Betrayers deserve justice, Jim.” The Shadow Man had become just that—a dark shape looming over him. “That’s why I need to know about Eric Steele and his father. They’re keeping something from you… keeping something from everyone.”

“I know everything about Eric,” Jim said. But he wasn’t sure he trusted what he just said. He’s tricking you. Don’t help him. Eric has always been your best friend… the whisper curled up his spine again.

“Not this.” The Shadow Man came forward. He sat down on the exam table again. The Shadow Man’s dark lips parted and he told Jim a story. Afterwards, Jim answered some questions. He wanted to. It was all very friendly.

* * *

The C130 bounced through turbulence. It shook Jim from his lousy sleep. He had been dreaming about the old man, the shots, the Shadow Man, and the truth about Tim Steele and, ultimately, Eric. Jim thought about it ever since the Shadow Man asked him to come along.

It wasn’t a request…The Shadow Man parsed his words with diplomacy, but there was never any outcome other than Jim on the plane soaring into hell. The Shadow Man was taking Jim home. You and a squad of special ops goons… what do you think they’re for?

Really, Jim did it for Eric. The Shadow Man told Jim that Eric wouldn’t be hurt if he went with them peacefully. Eric was Jim’s last, best friend. Jim didn’t want anything to happen to him. He’d already been stripped of his home, his school, his life… he couldn’t lose his friend.

And why go to all this trouble… flying me all the way home to talk to Eric? What if he won’t go?

He would. Jim told himself that. He came to believe it. Eric would go because Jim asked him. Because he’d feel ashamed that he had lied for all those years.

What if he didn’t lie? What if it’s not true? What if the Shadow Man is lying? He is, you know… not about everything, Jim didn’t think, but enough. The doubts in his mind waged war on each other. He knew he didn’t trust the Colonel, but what if the story was true? What if Eric really was some kind of harbinger of death? It felt unreal… impossible. This is the real world, right?

But the Colonel’s story had just enough details right. Eric’s dad was in the Air Force in Alaska and he had only been in for the minimum period; that much Mr. Steele had brought up in everyday conversation. But there were other things that he was vague about, like why he left and why they abruptly left Alaska. The story had been told with such detail leading up to his exit from the service and then just: I got out and we moved to Virginia. No cute stories about plane rides or packing or the temperature change, just “we left.” Then Eric was born. They were the kind of details Jim might have never given a second thought, until the Colonel filled in the blanks. Or did he? His story, too, was just specific enough to make the Steeles look like religious terrorists or something.

A shadow fell over Jim—the Shadow. It snapped him out of his ruminations. “You’re almost home, Jim. It’s been awhile. Maybe your parents will let you stay after they learn what you’ve done for the country. For everybody.”

Jim felt the landing gear extend and the plane trembled from descending wind gusts. He thought about what the Shadow Man said. He wanted to believe it. He needed to.

It was all a lie, but Jim had hope for the next day or so. After that, he wouldn’t have even hope.

* * *

The house was always neat and clean. Magazines and newspapers were in their proper places on a nice wall rack, pillows were seated in the corners of the couch angled like diamonds, and the doilies were situated evenly parallel with the edges of the coffee table and end tables. The color scheme was muted: green and burgundy with some light gold flourishes here and there. It was a basic living room oriented with the TV as its focus. A full couch with a bed pullout, a love seat, and a green reclining chair curled into a half circle around the coffee table. All of the distances between everything were precise and even. This was Eric’s house—a neat freak’s dream.

Eric often took the cleanliness and precision for granted. He had to admit that some of his mother’s cleaning peccadilloes had rubbed off on him, though she would have disagreed. Friends’ and neighbors’ homes, even tidy ones, looked unkempt by comparison.

What friends?

It hadn’t always been this way. His mom, Nancy, had always been clean and proper, but it became a way of life, a religion, about ten years earlier. The day the world changed. Their world. His world.

Something stirred inside. An emotion? Longing? Memory? Whatever it was, Eric found himself standing in front of the shelves flanking the TV. There were lots of carefully arranged photos. But they were old pictures from years past. They hadn’t taken many pictures lately.

A smile curved his lips. One picture was from his first hockey game. He and Jim used to be defensive partners for their community league. They were broken up on the high school team, but sometimes they’d get paired together during a bad line change or if they led by a big margin. Eric loved being out there with his friends at the same time. It was more fun that way. Drew had played hockey for years before high school, but coming together with his buddies on the same team had formed some of Eric’s happiest memories. Those were just memories now, too.

The picture seemed foreign now like he didn’t recognize those people anymore. In a way, he didn’t. Some of those old feelings were hard to grasp now. Hard to remember, even. They were hidden beneath the shell he had built. It protected him, sure, but he missed some of the feelings and memories it filtered out.

Not long after everything changed for Eric and his parents, they had visited Disney World. It was something they had never done before. The picture beside the hockey photo showed Eric, his parents, and Tigger posing in front of the big castle in the Magic Kingdom. Everyone was smiling and happy, even Tigger. Especially Tigger.

Eric had always wanted to go to Disney World, but he didn’t make it there until he was in the seventh grade. Throughout the years, as all of his friends and the other kids in class went, Eric begged his parents to go. Their answer was always the same: “Eric, you know we can’t.” And, of course, the reasons were obvious; even to a little boy.

As happy as he was to go when he did, it was disappointing. Disney World is for kids. He got there about four years too late. The sense of wonder and joy at seeing characters he watched in cartoons and movies for years was gone. Like most kids in junior high, he was “too cool” to get excited about it. For as bad as he wanted to go as a child, he wished he had never gone at all. Memories that others had made as children would fuel the need for future visits to re-imagine them and live them again. But Eric’s memories were like bread just gone stale or cool water—close, but not quite.

What he remembered most was how excited his parents were when they announced the trip. They had probably remembered every single time he had asked and, subsequently, every time they had to say “no.” Eric remembered that his dad was beaming when they told him. His mom was excited to go, too, to see what all of the hubbub was about. His parents had never been to Disney before either. Their parents, Eric’s grandparents, were poor, blue-collar folks from Buffalo, NY, so the trip was just as exciting for them.

But after they arrived, Eric saw in their faces what he had felt—close, but not quite. In some ways, he felt worse for his parents. They felt disappointed that the “magic” of the experience was beyond them, but also that it was beyond Eric too. One night, in Disney’s Contemporary Hotel, Eric overheard his parents talking. They thought he was asleep. His dad sounded sad.

“He doesn’t like it,” Tim had said.

“I think he’s too old. Maybe we shoulda gone to Universal. He’s talked about the ‘Jaws’ ride forever,” Nancy agreed.

“The worst part is that I really wanted to like it here too. But I don’t. It… misses something. I think if Eric and Sarah had been young kids and we’d been able to come, we could have… I dunno, lived through them. Ya know?”

“You wanna go home?”

“No… I think we need to stay. He always wanted to go. Maybe it’ll pick up. We still haven’t seen everything…”

That thing inside stirred again. Eric heard how disappointed his father had sounded. He wished he could’ve masked his reaction better. Like I can now. It’s easy now… Eric had been grateful for the trip (and still was), but he couldn’t have helped feeling what he had or, perhaps more accurately, hadn’t felt.

For instance, when he looked to the large photo that dominated the rest on the top shelf, he felt nothing. Without his shell, he would have felt something. That particular feeling was familiar and he had learned to shield it well. The picture showed a chubby, bald baby in a diaper lying across the chest of a girl about five years old. They were on a pink and blue blanket on the floor. The girl was beautiful, with long, flowing brown hair draped across a pillow in silken waves. Her skin was the color of milk; with freckles dotting rosy cheeks that tugged the edges of an amazing, full smile. But there was something not right with her. Her wrists were slightly bent and her hands extended, but… strained. One of the stiffened hands rested lightly on the baby’s back and the girl’s eyes were locked on him—alive and soft.

Something broke through Eric’s shield and he smiled. He touched the picture. His eyes were wet and he didn’t know it.

He was the baby; Eric Steele, one year old. The girl was his big sister, Sarah Steele, age five. She was as beautiful and glowing as ever.

Sarah was dead now. Ten years next month.

* * *

Nancy Steele’s had a routine—wake up, pee, put on her bathrobe, go to the kitchen, feed the cat, mix some chocolate milk, sit down, read the newspaper, and smoke. These things were done over the course of ten minutes every day and until they were completed, she didn’t speak to anybody. It was the routine.

She strayed from it once—ten years ago.

Eric knew that talking to his mom would do no good, but he always tried anyway. She rarely responded and when she did, it was usually something gruff. Eric didn’t take offense.

On this morning, when Eric finally left the photos in the living room, he strolled past the table more awake than he had been a few minutes ago. In part because the pictures stirred him up inside, but also because he wasn’t feeling so well. Sleep was still a challenge. He couldn’t get cool. The sheets were too warm. The covers. His tee shirt. His underwear. Even the pillow cover. Everything made him feel feverish. Heat was really seeping off of him.

The truth was that sleep had been difficult for a while now. Maybe it was just Melanie, but he was starting to think that it was something else. He couldn’t remember his dreams. Sleep, as it was, came in stretches of twenty minutes before he’d wake up clutching the bed. Once, he ripped his comforter. He hid the tear behind pillows and careful bed-making. The cover was expensive and Nancy wasn’t partial to untidiness.

Whatever was wrong with Eric, it was so obvious that his mom broke the silence to comment on it.

“Eric!” she said with surprise. Nancy put the newspaper down and swiveled. “Look at you. You’re all red.”

His hands and face were sweaty. Thick, feverish, salty sweat covered him like dew. His shirt stuck to him, but he thought it had been dry only moments before. He looked at his arm and they were red. It looked a lot like muted sunburn.

“Whoa.”

Nancy stepped out of her seat and pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. “God! You feel like you’ve got a bad fever.”

Eric shrugged. “I feel fine. A little hot, but I know how a fever feels.”

She felt his cheek. “Are you sure?”

He pulled away and went to the cereal cabinet. After some rustling, Eric produced an oatmeal packet. He poured it into a small dish and crossed to the fridge for milk.

“You’re going to school.” This was not a question but a hybrid question and command. Eric’s mom always thought he was trying to skip school.

“Yeah, Ma,” Eric said without looking at her. “I feel okay. A little warm, maybe. I didn’t get much sleep.”

Nancy frowned and returned to her chocolate milk and cigarette. “S’cause you stay up so late.”

“Not by choice. I’m not tired. Not for the last week or so anyway.”

Nancy picked up the newspaper and scanned the comics. “S’that girl, isn’t it?”

Not this…

Eric hated when his parents got involved with his personal life. On the one hand, he could tell they genuinely cared; on the other hand, they didn’t seem emotionally equipped to deal with the issues seriously. He didn’t blame them—they had been sapped emotionally. Sometimes people’s feelings can dry up after they’ve been used and used. Like a well, human emotion has a bottom—a limit. Eric shielded his; Tim and Nancy emptied theirs. Whatever the case, his parents criticized his feelings as though he didn’t have a right to them. It seemed to him sometimes like friends of a murder victim chastising a friend of a rape victim because their pain was worse. But how do you compare? You don’t. You can’t.

But his parents tried. Eric decided to just keep them in the dark. Denying a problem was less frustrating than hearing how he “shouldn’t feel that way.”

He knew Nancy was referring to Melanie. Eric wanted to deny it coolly, but where she was concerned he had a hard time faking. Plus, Nancy could needle him like only a mother could.

His response was cold. “No.”

“Your father and I broke up once or twice before we finally stayed together,” she said anyway.

Eric tried to end the discussion. “I’m not you and that won’t happen here.”

For all the times his mom could be gruff and cold, there were others when she had a great depth of compassion. Maybe the well wasn’t dry yet.

“It hurts bad now, but that’s because it’s new. You never had a girlfriend before. It’s hard to see it now, but you’ll get past it. There are plenty of other girls,” Nancy said before returning to her newspaper and smoke.

Only mom could crack the shield. Her words were comforting and the sentiment behind them more so. She was right. If it had only been a matter of losing a girlfriend, she might have reached him better. But it was more than that. A line of dominos that Eric watched fall around him. No. It was more than just a break up.

It was alienation.

The microwave chirped and then hummed to life. His oatmeal spun on the little ceramic dish inside. Sometimes he just stared at food spinning and cooking inside. It occurred to him that harmful microwaves were probably whittling away his eyesight.

My eyes are stronger.

His glasses had hurt his eyes recently. The prescription was becoming too strong. Driving at night gave him headaches now. The street lights weren’t glaring bulbs anymore; they were focused beams that stabbed his eyes.

Loud beeps signaled the end of the oatmeal’s rotation. It burbled and popped. A big chunk of it spat onto his wrist with a sizzle.

But he didn’t feel it.

* * *

Jim’s plane didn’t land at any airport you’ve heard of. The C130 touched down south of Washington, D.C., close to Quantico. Its mammoth wheels grinded to a halt and the craft settled near an old hangar. It was early morning and the rising sun was golden on the eastern horizon.

The two men that sat behind Jim on the flight walked one in front and one in back of him on the way off the plane. He assumed they expected him to run for it, but after flying for about six hours straight, the only place he would run is to is a bed.

Jim’s escorts stopped him about thirty yards from the plane and waited for everyone else to file off. He had stared at most of them on the way here, but this was his first time really seeing them. They were normal. Odd as it might sound, Jim was astounded by how average everyone looked. Loaded onto a plane in the dead of night by strangers who seemed to know everything about him, Jim expected these folks to at least wear a good sneer or a curled mustache. Maybe some horns. Maybe his paranoia—valid as it was—colored his judgment? Was it giving him nightmares and fantasies that weren’t there?

Fantasy? Like what the Shadow Man told you about Eric? That fantasy? Right… they just want to talk to Eric. Then you get to go home and live in the happy, froo-froo land of bunnies.

And WHAT were those shots for?

The Shadow Man exited just before the pilots. With the morning sun bearing down on him, there was no darkness to hide his features. What looked normal the other night was now… something else. In the sanitized light of the academy medical station, the Shadow Man looked older with grayed hair and a slightly wrinkled face. Beneath the sun, the natural light of God, Jim saw the man behind the shadow—a twisted old man with a frowning smile and hard, almost translucent, skin. He carried his overcoat across his left arm and descended the stairs like everyone else.

But he’s not like everyone else. No. Jim was sure of that now. He was suddenly very afraid for Eric. Deep down, though, he was more afraid for himself.