Kage: The Shadow A Connor Burke Martial Arts Thriller by John Donohue

Author:John Donohue [Donohue, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: YMAA Publication Center
Published: 2011-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

12 Shadow

The air in any modern hospital is dry and clean feeling, scrubbed into an antiseptic wash that is meant to offer comfort. I wasn’t buying it. The Burkes of older generations knew that hospitals were places where danger lurked. Their pale blue eyes were muddled with experience, superstition, and wear, but were keen to sense a threat. The hospital rooms and halls around me were permeated with an atmosphere that was dense with things unseen, yet real: fear, confusion, loneliness, the pain that pushes up through anesthetic like the limbs of a restless sleeper.

Our hug was awkward—at first I thought that it was because of my wound. But Sarah’s kiss was dry and perfunctory, like a ritual leached of meaning and best finished quickly.

“Hey,” I said as she sat beside me on the bed. “How are you?” I looked at her carefully. Sarah’s eyes are big and dark, set in a heart-shaped face that was meant to smile. But she looked worn and tired. Her eyes glistened and she looked away as if seeking a distraction from what lay before her.

“Oh, Burke,” she murmured, and reaching for a tissue on the table next to the bed, she got up to blow her nose.

I held my hand out, beckoning her closer. “Hey,” I said quietly, “It’s OK. We’re all right.” But she stood there, arms crossed in front of her as if in protection. She was folded in on herself, seeing something I didn’t. My words weren’t reaching her.

Sarah shook her head as if trying clear it. She looked up at me and smiled sadly. “Are we? Are we all right, Burke?” she demanded. Sarah closed her eyes for minute. “I keep seeing you on the floor this morning. The blood. The bodies…” she took a ragged gasp.

“Come here,” I urged her, and she slowly sat next to me on the bed and let me hold her. But I could feel the tension trembling in her shoulders. We sat there quietly for a time and I searched in vain for words of comfort. But I couldn’t come up with any. I hoped that somehow the very act of contact would offer solace, but I couldn’t be sure.

Sarah was part of the collateral damage of all violent acts: the survivors bear wounds as surely as the ones who don’t walk away. I’ve struggled with it and knew something of what she was experiencing. But each person deals with things like this differently. I’m harder. Not tougher, just harder. I don’t know whether Yamashita has made me that way or whether his training just revealed something about me I never knew before. Sarah was a brighter, gentler person. For her to not only be attacked, but ultimately to have to kill someone, was going to press on her like a crushing weight. It wasn’t that she ultimately wouldn’t be able to stand the pressure, it was that the shadow of that weight would forever change the way she saw the world.

The world, I realized, had been a brighter place before she met me.

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