Signalz

by F. Paul Wilson

  He pushed his head and chest above the floor line and was straining to lever the rest of himself up when he heard a sound in his living room. He froze and listened.

  His apartment door had just opened, and now it closed. Softly.

  He opened his mouth to call out but then shut it. He’d locked the door—a reflex when you lived in a place like this—which meant the intruder either had a key or had picked the lock. Frankie had never given a key to anyone.

  Shit. Someone was boosting his place.

  What would Jake Fixx do?

  Well, fuck that. His recurring character—written under his own name—was an ex SEAL who could take down multiple attackers with ease. And what was he? A sedentary writer with atrophied muscles who hadn’t worked out since his teens.

  He’d wait it out and hope he wasn’t discovered.

  But the big question was why—why would anyone break into his place? He had no valuables beyond his laptop, which wasn’t particularly high end anyway. And even if that were stolen, all his work was backed up in Dropbox. So who—?

  Wait. The Septimus folks? Could it be?

  He’d been thinking of them as some sort of stuck-up BPOE group, but at the meeting last night the two honchos there had said the Octogon Brotherhood in Frankie’s book was too much like Septimus for comfort. The Octogon had come to him in one of his dreams—utterly ruthless, eliminating anyone who got in its way like the average Joe would swat a fly. And those Septimus honchos had made it very clear they did not want Dark Apocalypse published.

  Had they sent someone to make sure that didn’t happen? Ever?

  This was the kind of stuff he wrote about. Fiction. It didn’t happen in real life—at least not to him.

  Frankie held his breath as the intruder stomped into his bedroom. He watched the guy’s Nikes through the one-inch gap between the rug and the bottom of the nightstand. Saw him get down on his hands and knees and check under the bed.

  Please don’t look back here! Please, don’t look back here!

  He didn’t. Frankie released his breath when the guy stormed out of the room.

  What to do? He couldn’t stay here, balancing on a chair set atop a dresser. His best bet was to—

  Out in the front room, the intruder started to talk to someone. Were there two of them?

  “Hey, it’s Belgiovene. I’m in the guy’s apartment but he’s not around…yeah, his laptop’s here, open and running, so I don’t think he’ll be out long.”

  Sounded like he was on a phone.

  “Well, in a way this works out better. I’ll lock his door just like he left it and be waiting for him when he wanders back in…right, won’t know what hit him…and yeah-yeah, I know: Take the laptop.” A pause, then a muttered, “Fuck you, Drexler. This ain’t my first rodeo.”

  The realization that this guy was here to either kill him or beat the crap out of him almost tumbled Frankie off the chair. Time to retreat. Bending his shaky knees and praying he didn’t lose his balance, he lowered himself to the dresser and then to the floor.

  Okay. No heroics. Call the cops and report a thief or a home invader or whatever in his apartment. He pulled out his phone, punched in 9-1-1, and waited. When no one answered, he repeated. Then he noticed No Service on the screen. How could that be? The only place in this city with no service was a deep basement or a subway tunnel without a repeater.

  He stepped into the kitchen and grabbed the wall phone there but got no dial tone. And what the fuck—a rotary phone?

  Had to find a spot with a signal.

  He hurried out to the hall but stopped when he reached it. None of this looked familiar. And the number on the apartment door said 11-M. No way. He’d come down to the third floor, right below his own place.

  Feeling like reality was slipping away, he hit the stairs and stopped again. What happened to all the graffiti? The stairwell had been coated with bullshit tags. This one was clean—totally clean.

  Shaky now, he hurried up to the next floor—supposed to be the fourth but the door was labeled 12.

  What’s going on?

  He peeked down the hall. His was the fifth door down and it stood open. In fact, all the apartment doors were open.

  And then the silence hit him. He realized he hadn’t heard a human voice or a single note of music since he’d left 11-M. That just didn’t happen in his building. Some asshole was always blasting rap or salsa or something equally obnoxious behind one of the doors.

  Where is everybody?

  Frankie crept down the hall and peeked into his own place.

  Except it wasn’t his place. The furniture wasn’t the same, the walls were a different color, no work desk, no laptop, no bookshelves, and…and the emptiness was palpable. The whole building felt deserted.

  He stepped to the nearest window where he looked out on a city he’d never seen before. He didn’t know where he was but that wasn’t the Lower East Side out there. Nothing on the skyline looked familiar. And worse—nothing was moving—empty streets, empty sidewalks. The place looked like a ghost town.

  “Shit!”

  Before he knew it he was fleeing along the hall and down the stairs and back to 11-M. He’d take his chances with Belgiovene or whatever he called himself. At least he’d be back in New York, not this…this empty movie set.

  He charged into the bedroom and began to climb onto the dresser when he noticed that the ceiling was intact. No gap. Not even a crack. Sealed up as if nothing had ever been wrong.

  Frankie kneeled on the chair and pounded on the ceiling where the gap had been.

  “No! NO!”

  HARI

  The propjet flight from Newark was noisy and bumpy but on time. Enterprise had their rental—a black Taurus—ready and waiting, the only hitch being a brief argument over who would drive, which Donny lost. Hari didn’t like being a passenger, so she convinced Donny he’d be the better navigator. Once they got rolling they had a second argument when Donny wanted to play music from his phone through the car’s sound system. Thirty seconds’ worth was all she could stand.

  “I would call that bad music,” she said, turning it off, “but that would classify it as music, which it most definitely is not.”

  “You don’t like DMX? He’s from my high school days.”

  “He makes the B-52s sound good.”

  “Who are the B-52s?”

  “You never heard of—I don’t believe it. ‘Rock Lobster?’ The worst rock song ever?”

  A head shake. “Nope. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Consider yourself lucky. Find a country station.”

  He looked horrified. “Country? You like country?”

  She didn’t, but she figured he’d like it less.

  By noon they were cruising through an industrial park just outside Albany where Sirocco Trucking occupied a huge warehouse. Hari passed it once to get the lay of the land. It sat on a low rise with a big, tree-lined parking lot. Good thing she had the address because no one had bothered to put a sign out front, just a number.

  She swung back and turned into a gently curving driveway. She found a space in the packed parking lot and spotted a uniformed guard walking a German shepherd. She didn’t like the way the dog tugged toward their car, so she called from her window.

  “Excuse me! This is Sirocco Trucking, right?”

  He approached with the dog and stopped a dozen feet away. His dark blue uniform housed a running back’s build that had yet to go to seed. His baseball cap with its Septimus Security logo, his big aviator sunglasses, and his thick mustache didn’t leave much of his face visible, but what Hari could see looked surprised.

  “You’re looking for Sirocco? Well, I guess you found it.”

  She guessed they didn’t get many drop-ins.

  “Great. Where’s the office?”

  “The office…the office is around the corner but no one’s there.”

  “Out to lunch?”

  “No one’s ever there. Can I help you?”

  Da
mn. They’d been assuming they could at least get inside the building.

  “We’d like to rent a truck.”

  “They don’t rent trucks.”

  During this scintillating repartee, another guard in identical garb with an identical dog rounded a corner and stopped to watch.

  What is this? Hari thought. Do we somehow look threatening?

  “I mean,” she said, “we’d like to arrange to ship some things.”

  “All their trucks are spoken for.”

  “All of them?”

  “Every one.”

  He sounded coached.

  “Do you think we might have a look at them?”

  “That’s not an option, ma’am.”

  “Are you sure?” she said. “Is there someone I can speak—?”

  “The office is empty and I’m afraid you can’t park here.”

  Hari gave him a hard stare. He stared back through his shades.

  And that was all she wrote. Hari could see she wasn’t going to win here, so she backed out of her space and headed down the drive.

  “That went well,” Donny said. “What now?”

  “Notice anything?” she said as they hit the industrial park’s common boulevard.

  “Besides guys patrolling the grounds of a trucking company with dogs? I mean, seriously—German shepherds? Whoever heard of that? It tells me they’re majorly paranoid about someone glomming onto whatever it is they’re up to. And as for little boy blue back there, he wasn’t giving anything away. I mean, nada.”

  “All good points. But I’m more interested in the parking lot.”

  A pause, then, “Full. Lots of cars.” Another pause as he rubbed his stubble. “They could belong to drivers arriving to take a haul somewhere.”

  “Exactly. The question is: Have they already left, or are they gathering to leave together?”

  Donny grinned. “A convoy? Seems unlikely, but only one way to find out. I see a stake-out in our future. Let’s get some food first. We need to stock up on munchies. I saw a strip mall back by the highway with some fast-food joints.”

  Hari knew where he meant and headed there.

  “Speaking of fast food,” she said, “did you hear how McDonald’s bought the Wendy’s logo and won’t let them use it? So pretty soon, unless you already know where your Wendy’s is, you won’t be able to find one.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Yep.”

  A long pause, then a sigh, then, “Y’know, one day that mouth of yours could get you killed.”

  “I know. Can’t wait.”

  At the mall Hari picked up two large coffees—both for her—at an espresso bar while Donny bought these box lunches from Taco Bell that contained enormous amounts of food. Then they found a parking spot in the lot of the FedEx depot across the boulevard with a view of the Sirocco driveway.

  “Do you ever drink anything that doesn’t contain caffeine?” Donny said just before cramming a soft taco into his face.

  “Only when forced by circumstance. You don’t want to know me when I run low.”

  The wait turned out to be shorter than Hari had anticipated. In fact she’d expected to be watching trucks returning from a haul. But at 1:22 one tractor-trailer after another started pulling out and heading for the freeway. Half of the trailers were rectangular freight semis, while the rest were tankers.

  Hari counted ten rigs in all. When it looked like no more were joining the parade, she pulled out and followed.

  “Odd time for a convoy, don’t you think?” Donny said. “I mean, if you’re not keen on drawing attention, an afternoon truck convoy is not the way to go.”

  “Makes even less sense when you consider the level of security they have around the building. I’d give anything for a look inside one of those trailers. Just a peek. Then we can head back.”

  Maybe they’d all pull into a rest stop and she could sneak up on one.

  “What about those tankers? They could be filled with anything—gasoline, water, chemicals, slime, anything.”

  “‘Slime’?”

  “Yeah. Green goop. I’m guessing you never watched Nick.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “It’s a cable channel. Nickelodeon.”

  As Donny launched into an explanation she only half heard, Hari followed the convoy to 787 North where it rolled to Troy, then crossed the Hudson onto Route 2 East.

  “Where the hell are we going?” she said.

  The car came equipped with its own wi-fi hotspot and Donny had his tablet fired up and running.

  “If we stay on Two here, it’ll bring us into the Taconic Mountains.”

  “How long’s that going to take?”

  “Not bad—forty-five minutes or so to the Massachusetts border.”

  “And then what?”

  “Lots of mountains.”

  Great. Hari hadn’t planned on any of this. She’d expected a few hours’ worth of nosing around to yield what they wanted—the nature of the cargo. That, in turn, would lead them to the reason for the Septimus stock sell off.

  Route 2 soon started calling itself Taconic Trail, and seemed to be running perpetually uphill. Which meant slow going in the lower gears for the big rigs. They passed the Massachusetts line and kept on trucking.

  “How much longer?” Hari groaned.

  “Well, since I don’t know the destination, I can’t very well—”

  “Rhetorical! Rhetorical!”

  A couple of miles into Massachusetts the trucks took a left off Route 2 onto a narrow side road. A sign with an arrow read Norum Hill.

  “I think we just learned their destination,” Donny said. “Norum Hill.”

  Hari turned and followed them up the mountain road. “How do you know they’re not going to keep on rolling?”

  “Because according to the map, this road goes to the summit where there’s some kind of memorial to an Indian chief whose—”

  “It’s ‘Native American,’” Hari said. “I’m Indian.”

  “Right. Sorry. Anyway, I can’t pronounce his name, but the road ends there. When you want to come down you have to use this road.”

  The road could barely fit two cars.

  “Not with those trucks on it you’re not. How do they—?”

  A cop car with Berkshire County Sheriff emblazoned on the door was parked on the shoulder ahead. An armed deputy in a tan uniform, Stetson hat, and Sam Brown belt, who had been lounging against the front grille, stepped into the road and held up his hand.

  Donny stuck his head out the passenger window. “What’s the problem, officer?”

  “Rock fall ahead. You need to turn around and go back.”

  “What about all those trucks we’ve been stuck behind like forever?”

  “They’re gonna be a problem.” He didn’t budge from the middle of the road. “We have to get them turned around somehow. In the meantime, you’ve got to go back down to the highway and stay off this road.”

  “But—”

  His voice hardened. “We’re both speaking English, aren’t we? Turn around, go back down to the highway, and stay off this road.”

  Hari waved at the deputy and began backing up.

  “Hey, Hari,” Donny said, “what are you doing? We need to—”

  She lowered her voice and said, “What we need is to not draw attention to ourselves. Look at Deputy Dog’s face. He’s not going to let us by.”

  “But he’s lying.”

  “Of course he is. He might not even be with the sheriff’s department. But you said it yourself: This road ends at the summit. What goes up, must come down. We simply have to wait.”

  They parked farther east on Route 2 where they had a discrete and only partially obstructed view of the turnoff. Hari lowered the windows, turned off the engine, and they settled in to wait.

  It turned out to be a short wait—half an hour, tops—before the convoy started rolling back onto the Taconic Trail and heading downhill toward Albany. But only the tractors were rolling.
All the semi-trailers had been left behind.

  “And there goes Deputy Dog,” Hari said as the sheriff’s car brought up the rear.

  “Why do you keep calling him that?”

  “The cartoon. You don’t remember Deputy Dog?”

  “Nope.”

  “Not important.”

  Hey, Nineteen started playing in her head.

  Hari waited until the sheriff’s unit drove out of sight and they had the road to themselves, then headed back up Norum Hill.

  “They left their loads up there,” Donny said, staring at his tablet.

  “Yes, Captain Obvious.”

  “But where? There’s one road to the top with no turnoffs.”

  He was getting on her nerves.

  “Maybe they’ve created a turnoff that’s not on the map. Maybe they left the trailers at the summit.”

  “Ten semis and tankers?”

  “Exactly. You can’t hide all those, so can we stop speculating? We’re on our way up the mountain. We will see wherever they left them.”

  But they didn’t.

  Hari drove all the way to the summit without seeing anything but trees. The top had been flattened somewhat and layered with gravel for parking. A short memorial obelisk stood near a tall cell tower at the northern edge, but otherwise…nothing. The view might have been impressive had Hari’s interest in mountain vistas exceeded nil.

  Donny got out and inspected the ground.

  “No sign of anything with major tonnage up here recently. The gravel would be chewed up.”

  “Which means we missed it. We’ll take it real slow going back down.”

  But before leaving the summit she did a slow circuit of the perimeter of the groomed area. The Norum Hill road stayed mostly on the eastern and northern faces of the mountain and she saw why. The western face was much steeper.

  “See anything that looks like a bunch of trucks down there?” she said.

  Donny craned his neck to look but neither of them saw any sign of the trailers.

  “Nothing. How is this possible? I’ve got a topographical map of this place on my tablet and, according to that, the summit here is the only even vaguely flat spot on the whole hill. There’s no place that’ll accommodate ten semis but here.”