Paris is a Bitch

something metallic. I pulled whatever it was out and stared at it. It took me a moment to realize what I was holding: a small video camera.
    Oh, shit.
    A wire extended from the unit, disappearing beneath his clothes. I slipped my fingers between the buttons of his shirt and tore it open. The wire ran to one of the buttons. I leaned in—it wasn’t easy to see in the dim light—and looked more closely. Shit, it was no button at all, but a lens. And I was staring right into it.
    I tore the wire free and stuffed the camera and phone into my pockets, then scrambled over to where the other guy lay. He was similarly equipped. I pocketed the second phone and camera, too, and walked off, keeping to the quiet streets paralleling Yasukuni-dori. I would take the batteries out of the phones to make sure they were untraceable and examine the cameras as soon as I was safely away from the bodies. If the two giants had been using the equipment only to monitor each other, I would be okay.
    But I had a feeling they weren’t just monitoring each other. And if I was right, I was in for another visit, and soon.
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Blake Crouch
    THE tattered windsock hangs limp against its pole. Weeds erupt through fissures in the ancient pavement of the runway where she stands, and in the distance, support beams rise from heaps of twisted metal—three hangars, long since toppled upon a half dozen single- and twin-engine airplanes. She watches the Beechcraft that brought her here lift off the ground, props screaming, and climb to clear the pines a quarter mile past the end of the runway. She walks into the field. The midmorning sun blazing down on her bare shoulders. The grass that grazes her sandaled feet still cold with dew. Someone jogs toward her, and beyond them she can see the team already at work, imagines they started the moment the light became worth a damn.
    The young man who has come to greet her smiles and tries to take her duffle bag, but she says, “No, I’ve got it, thanks,” and keeps walking, her eyes catching on the colony of white canvas tents standing several football fields away near the northern edge of the forest. Still probably an insufficient distance to avoid the stink when the wind blows out of the south.
    “Good flight in?” he asks.
    “Little bumpy.”
    “It’s so cool to finally meet you. I’ve read all about your work. I’m even using two of your books in my thesis.”
    “That’s great. Good luck with it.”
    “You know, there’s a few decent bars in town. Maybe we could get together and talk sometime?”
    She lifts the strap of her heavy bag, swings it onto the other shoulder, and ducks under the yellow crime scene tape that circumnavigates the pit.
    They arrive at the edge.
    The young man says, “I’m doing my thesis on—”
    “I’m sorry, what’s your name?”
    “Matt.”
    “I don’t mean to be rude, Matt, but could you give me a minute alone here?”
    “Oh, sure. Yeah, of course.”
    Matt heads off toward the tents, and she lets her bag slide off her shoulder into the grass, estimating the dimensions of the pit at thirty-five meters by twenty meters, and presently attended to by nine people, seemingly oblivious to the flies and the stench, each in their respective worlds, doing what they walk this earth to do. She sits down and watches them work. Nearby, a man with shoulder-length graying hair buries a pickax into a wall of dirt. A young woman—probably another intern—flits from station to station, filling a bucket with backdirt to be added to the mound of grave fill near the southern edge of the pit. Everywhere that human remains have been exposed, red flags stand thrust into the earth. She stops counting them after thirty. The nearest anthropologist appears on the verge of pedestaling a skeletonized body, down to the detail work now—poking chopsticks between ribs to clear out the dirt. Other skeletons lie partially exposed in the upper layers. The remnants of human beings with