Gatekeeper Read online

  GATEKEEPER

  Copyright © 2020 Alison Levy

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Published by SparkPress, a BookSparks imprint,

  A division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC

  Phoenix, Arizona, USA, 85007

  www.gosparkpress.com

  Published 2020

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-68463-057-8 (pbk)

  ISBN: 978-1-68463-058-5 (e-bk)

  Library of Congress Control Number: [LOCCN]

  Book design by Stacey Aaronson

  All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For Matt and Eric

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1 SKIPTRACE

  2 PETTY THEFT

  3 THE STATION

  4 BURDEN

  5 ORACLE

  6 MARKET

  7 SHUTDOWN

  8 BACH

  9 EXPERT

  10 COINCIDENCE

  11 STAKEOUT

  12 BASEMENT DOOR

  13 TRAPPED

  14 WASTELAND

  15 RIOT

  16 GATEKEEPER

  17 CRAWLSPACE

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  The pounding rain soaked through her clothes in seconds, washing away the blood on her shirt and hands. Her shoes were soggy and made her feet heavy as she sprinted through the city streets. Panting, she ran blindly, with no idea where she was headed in the darkness, only conscious of what she was running from. The adrenaline flooding her veins drowned out her grief. She felt nothing but terror.

  “Run!” The memory of her father’s final command reverberated in her ears. He had shouted it at her as he grabbed the man with the knife. But she hadn’t run then. She’d still been crouched over her mother.

  THE UMBRELLA SHE held shielded the violent struggle from her view. She held her mother and wailed.

  “Mom!” she screamed. “Oh God, Mom!”

  At first, she begged—begged her mother, begged God, begged the red gush of blood—while she pressed her hands over the wounds, as if trying to force her mother’s life back into her limp body. Then, barely hearing her own voice, she began to apologize. She apologized for arguing with her mother that morning. She apologized for not studying for the exam. She apologized for sneaking out with her friends after curfew. She would never do it again. She was so, so sorry.

  When nothing she said triggered a change, she began to sob. “Mom! Mom!” The blood spreading over her mother’s green blouse slowed from a gush to a trickle. Her wet, red hands trembled as her eyes inched their way to her mother’s face. “Mom?”

  Rain beat down on her mother’s dull, unblinking eyes.

  Her chest constricted. She could only breathe in tiny gasps. The world fell away, reduced to a muffled blur, as she stared at her mother’s body. The wild pounding of the rain on her umbrella drowned out the rest of the world, filling her ears with a dull white noise. With every labored breath, she expected to wake up from this nightmare. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. This sort of thing happened to other people— not to her, not to her mother. It was all a mistake.

  It wasn’t until her father shouted her name several times that she remembered the assailant. As she lifted her gaze from her mother’s corpse, the world came back into focus, and when she glanced out from under the rim of her umbrella, she saw two men locked in a violent struggle barely two steps away. Blood from a dozen red slashes ran all over her father’s arms. He had the young attacker by the wrist and was holding the knife at bay, but the man was fighting hard to get free.

  Only then did she realize that the killer wasn’t looking at her father. Far from concentrating on the struggle at hand, the lean young man was staring with heart-stopping intensity right at her. And his eyes were blazing with murder.

  Her broken heart pumped out cold terror. The umbrella slipped from her trembling fingers and fell to the ground; its dark canopy spun for a moment before it tipped onto its side and came to rest in a puddle. Her father bellowed at her again —“Run!”—and this time she jumped to her feet. Jolted by the stranger’s glare and her father’s desperate shout, she bolted.

  TIME PASSED IN gasps and footsteps. She had no sense of whether she had been running for blocks or miles. As fatigue overtook her muscles, the memory of her mother’s dull stare overtook her mind. Soaked to the bone, she came to a stop, hot tears streaming down her face and mingling with the cold rain. Her mom was dead. This new reality of her life wrapped its long fingers around her brain and dug in its claws.

  She let out a pained sob and sank to her knees. Through heavily blurred vision, she glanced around, barely registering the tightly packed old buildings and cobblestone street. She stared vacantly at the distorted reflections of the streetlamps’ glow in the rain-stained sidewalk. The illuminated water flowed into the cracks between the paver stones and over the edge of the curb, draining into the road. It looked like a painting that had been splashed with paint thinner and left on the wall to run and drip. The storm beat down upon her. Her tears streamed through her long, unbound hair as she wrapped her arms around her torso, giving herself the hug she would never again give her mom, and let out a deep moan.

  A car sped past, its headlights barely penetrating the downpour, and splashed a puddle over her. She was so drenched that she hardly felt the water, but the noise of the vehicle brought her out of her mournful trance.

  Still shaking from exhaustion and misery, she got to her feet and looked back the way she’d come. The rain and her tear-filled eyes made the world a dark, wet haze.

  “Daddy?” she called out.

  As far as she could see, she was the only living soul on the street. She squinted against the storm and took a few steps in the direction of the scene she had fled.

  “Daddy?” she said again.

  The only response she got was the drumming of the rain. For the first time, it occurred to her that she might have lost both parents in the same night. Even when she had seen her father struggling with the killer, she’d never once thought that he might die. Her father—a large, strong man—was invincible in her eyes. She couldn’t fathom that he would ever be beaten by anyone, especially a man threatening her life. What outcome could there be but that he would fight off the stranger and then come to rescue her?

  But he hadn’t come.

  Her grief was suddenly overpowered by fear. Without her father, she had no family left. Without him, she was alone.

  “Daddy!” she shouted as she started to run. “Daddy, where are you?”

  A shape came out of the night, shuffling through the puddles, obscured by the curtain of rain. She hurried toward it, her desperate mind filling in the details of the outline until it looked like her father.

  It wasn’t until she was a few strides away that the truth asserted itself and she skidded to a stop, arms flailing and eyes wide. The man was too young, too tall, and too lean. It wasn’t her father.

  The stranger’s murderous gaze locked onto hers again, and he lifted his knife. She opened her mouth to scream, but mortal terror choked her; all that escaped her lips was a squeak. In the light of the streetlamp, the killer smirked.

  She pivoted on her heel and scrambled away like a mouse that had just stumbled upon a coiled snake. At the far end of the block, she spotted a
nother man and headed straight for him.

  “Help me!” she shrieked. “Help me, please!”

  The short, heavyset man turned in her direction, and she felt a flush of hope and relief: she had been seen. She glanced back at her parents’ murderer and saw him walking, almost casually, toward her.

  “That man!” she yelled, pointing. “He stabbed—”

  With her eyes on her pursuer, she never saw the blade that slid between her ribs.

  On the ground, gasping like a fish on the floor of a boat, she stared up at the pitch-black sky. Pain radiated outward from the stab wound in her chest and encompassed her entire body like a cocoon. The storm pelted her with its emotionless tears and washed away the evidence of her wound even as it oozed from her veins.

  Two men appeared on the edges of her vision, her parents’ attacker and her own. Their unfamiliar faces peered down at her with identical, bland expressions.

  “Just the girl?” asked her assailant. “Where’s the other one?”

  “Dead,” the younger man replied. “Husband, too.”

  Daddy? A fresh wave of pain seized her body; lava-hot tears scalded her eyes.

  “This kid’s the last one, then.” The older man leaned over her and squinted down through a pair of glasses. “There should be more of a dent in the dimensional barrier by now.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the young man said through a yawn. He scratched at his neck with the hilt of his knife. “‘Dimensional barrier,’ ‘last one’—nothing you people say makes much sense.”

  “Just answer me this: Is there anyone else in the family? Another daughter? A sister? An aunt?”

  “Both of the parents are only children and this girl’s their only kid. I killed every other relative on the list you gave me. The whole family’s a dead end.”

  The whole family.

  Her eyes swayed from one man to the other and then to as much of the world as she could see from where she lay on the street. A blaze of light cut across her vision, accompanied by the sound of tires slicing through puddles. She opened her mouth to call for help, but as she drew breath, blinding pain shot through her torso and quashed her voice. The car drove up the street without slowing. The two men showed no sign of concern at its passing.

  “If she’s the last,” the older man said as he carefully scanned the area around her bleeding body, “then there’d be a breach opening up about now. But there’s not.” He sucked air through his teeth and shook his head. “Fuck.” He took out his phone and, leaning forward to shield it from the rain with his body, typed a message. “There’s another one somewhere.”

  “Another what?”

  “Gatekeeper.”

  “More weird terminology,” the younger man griped. “Whatever. You want me to kill someone else?”

  “Doubtful,” the older man said. “We did a very thorough search of this branch of the family. It’s more likely that the gatekeeper we want is abroad. We’ll get someone to find her and then send another one like you to finish the job.”

  “Another one like me?” The younger man chuckled. “How many murderers are on your payroll?”

  “Too many,” the older man replied with obvious disgust.

  The wiry young killer snorted and casually waved his knife in the older man’s direction. “If you people don’t like it,” he said, “then do your own dirty work. Or are you above that sort of thing?”

  “Clearly not,” the older man said, and she saw him nod down at her. “Just because we dislike violence doesn’t mean we aren’t prepared to do what’s necessary.” His phone chimed and he looked at the screen. “Our world needs to change,” he said as he typed, “even if that means that yours has to burn.”

  As he put his phone away, he glanced down and briefly locked eyes with her. She gasped and tried to turn her head to avoid his eyes. He quickly looked away. “She’s still alive,” he said to the younger man. “Take care of it.”

  Daddy’s not coming for me, the girl thought as the man leaned down with his knife in hand. No one’s coming for me. The blade that had killed her parents hovered before her eyes. It was shiny and clean. It should have so much blood on it, she thought. How can it be so clean when it’s killed so much?

  The knife flashed in and out of her sight. She knew he was stabbing her, but the pain was like a distant echo. Blood loss had left her body numb; she felt hollow and cold. The two men vanished from her dimming sight. She vaguely heard them talking about the weather as their voices retreated.

  Her eyelids were heavy, but she stared up at the black sky one last time, wishing there were stars. A primal voice in her mind whispered for her mother one last time before she closed her eyes and finally let go.

  1

  SKIPTRACE

  Rachel opened her eyes, feeling off balance. As her brain cast off sleep’s foggy blanket, she glanced around the room. Through the gap in the curtains, a sliver of light drew a buttery line across the armchair, the patchwork area rug, and one corner of the coffee table. Dust floated through the beam like plankton in the ocean’s depths; the smell of it was thick in the air.

  She glanced at her watch. It was early evening. The beam of light was all wrong. The sunlight usually came through the opposite window at this time of day. That meant the sun had risen over the wrong horizon yet again. Just one of the “fun” things about living in this house, she told herself. She drew a deep breath and pushed herself into a sitting position. Her back was stiff, but a quick walk around the house would probably be sufficient to put her muscles in proper working order. If only the path of the sun could be so easily fixed.

  Wait . . . what woke me up?

  Her cell phone, perched on the back of the sofa, was buzzing softly. She reached for it and pressed her thumb to the screen. The surface stayed jet black as it scanned her thumbprint; then it sprang to life with a bright and colorful glow. Immediately, it informed her that she had three text messages from Wu.

  5:02pm

  You’re late for assignment.

  5:28pm

  You missed assignment.

  5:29pm

  You’re screwed.

  “Crap.” She scowled at the phone’s clock, still happily ticking away despite having passed the programmed alarm time without so much as a buzz. She stretched her arms over her head, and a shiver raced through her body. With a sinking sensation in her gut, she realized that the temperature had dropped as she slept. Either the heat was broken again or the solar panels couldn’t pick up enough light to power anything with the sun on the wrong side of the house.

  “Your alarm didn’t work,” she said to the phone, “I missed assignment, and the heat’s out. What are you going to do about it?”

  The phone glowed pleasantly, indifferent to its failure. Rachel made an obscene gesture at the screen and turned it off.

  She yanked her fingers through the tangles in her dark brown, shoulder-length hair before—still grumbling—she pulled it into a ponytail. She was sorely tempted to chop it all off once and for all. There were strict appearance guidelines for those in her line of work, but some rules had relaxed recently. Short hair on a woman was no longer odd, so cutting hers wouldn’t amount to that worst of all offenses: standing out in a crowd. And having one less petty annoyance in her day was tempting.

  On her way to the front door, she ducked into the hall bathroom and checked her reflection. Her hair was in decent order, and her face—small, and the color of almond cream— was clean. Satisfied, she strode around the corner to the foyer, donned her old coat, and shoved her small feet into her boots before throwing open the front door and trotting down the front steps of the old house.

  On the sidewalk, she paused to glance back at the hole in the cross-hatching beneath the porch. Two little eyes reflected the light—pinpoint ghosts gazing out at her from the safety of their tomb. That stray dog was still living in the crawlspace. She never fed it, never spoke to it, and had never even gotten close enough to it to know what breed it w
as, yet it seemed attached to living right underneath her nose. It was a wonder the animal didn’t starve to death.

  Drawing a deep breath, she looked up. The sky was mostly clear—only a couple of clouds drifting through an otherwise lovely blue—but what she saw was meaningless. This place was a scoop of substance dropped into a sea of infinite nothing. The weather within this tiny sphere of existence and the weather in the larger reality bore no relation to each other; they were like two sequential channels on the television: next to each other in order but playing entirely different programs. She was about to change the channel.

  She walked a few yards down the front path, toward a point where the walkway faded like a smeared chalk drawing. Just a stone’s throw from the house, it was as if everything just stopped. The colors of the grass, the sky, and the clouds all blended into a sunlit smear at the edges of the dimension, as if reality had melted slightly and run together like wax. Just beyond that point, the mingled colors drizzled and faded until there was nothing but an off-white blur that extended into eternity. This was the boundary of the pocket dimension. As she approached it, fog engulfed her. In a fraction of a second, it went from being wispy and gray to thick and dark like the smoke of an oil fire. She took one more step, and it became an ink blot that swallowed everything in view.

  No matter how many times she experienced this, Rachel always ended up feeling as disoriented as a sparrow underwater. The path to the house should be behind her, marking the short route she had traveled, but there was no path in her wake. Another step would put a new road under her feet. But here, in this instant, no path existed. Here, her skin was the very boundary of reality. It wasn’t just that she was the sole inhabitant of the universe; she was the universe. All else was oblivion, the unpolluted vacancy of all.

  Her spirit fought the disconnect, just as it did every time she walked this path, by reaching out, searching the empty black for some tuft of substance. But there was nothing. It was empty. Dark. Nothing.