by James Knapp
“You’d never believe me.”
She poured me another one, and one for herself. After that, it started flowing pretty freely.
“You don’t want to tell me,” she said.
I shrugged.
“Has it to do with your gift?” she asked.
“My gift?”
“That thing you do,” she said. “The way you calm Ted down. How does it work?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and swallowed another glassful. With my nose in the glass, I breathed in, drawing in the fumes.
“Oh, come on.”
“Really, I wish I did.”
“Are you psychic?”
“I don’t know what I am,” I said, shaking my head.
“For all I know, we’re not even really having this conversation.”
I didn’t notice right away because I was starting to get drunk, but she was looking at me all seriously, and the smile was gone.
“You really see things?”
Instead of answering, I held out my glass again, and she poured some more in.
“Like ghosts?” she asked.
“No.”
“Visions?”
“They’re not hallucinations.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“They’re not. I wish they were.”
“Why?”
Because they scare me. They scare me to my soul, and if they are real and I’m not crazy, then a lot of terrible things are going to happen. . . .
“Because it all burns,” I said, looking into the glass. What little light there was looked red through the liquor, shimmering like little hot embers. When I looked back at her, her eyes had gotten wider.
“What does—”
“I don’t want to talk about that, okay?”
Karen nodded.
“Why wouldn’t you let me thank you before?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“You know he used to hit me all the time,” she said, looking down into her glass.
“I know.”
“But not anymore,” she said, “and that’s because of you. I know this is a touchy subject for you, but just let me say it, okay? I don’t know what it is you do or how you do it, but you’ve been a big help. Whether you meant to or not, you made a difference to me. I’ve always wanted to stop you, to talk to you. I’ve always wanted to thank you, but I was afraid.”
As she spoke, I felt this sort of heaviness coming over me, like a fog or water. The light in the room seemed to dim.
“I need to be clear about something,” I said, and I was suddenly very conscious that my words were slurring. “I can’t change anyone or anything. Calming down a violent person doesn’t make him not violent—you get it? If I know something that’s going to happen, I can’t make it not happen. I can’t change anything.”
“You might think that,” she said, “but you’re wrong. People change things all the time. Maybe they don’t do it by reaching into people’s heads, but they don’t have to. They do it by reaching out to them, even if it’s just something little. That’s how you change things, and anyone can do it. Even you.”
She looked up from her glass, and her eyes were a ghostly color. Like moonlight. They glowed softly, and in that instant before she looked down again, they watched me with a cold, dead indifference.
I felt like the floor dropped out from under me, and my face started to feel cold. From outside the window I heard what sounded like a transformer blowing or a loud firework going off from blocks away. I thought I was hearing things, but she heard it too. When she looked back from the window, her eyes were normal.
“What was that?” she asked.
“You need to leave,” I said. Another sound, one she didn’t hear, was getting louder. It was a sound like voices all talking at once.
“I’m sorry—”
“You need to leave,” I said again, getting up. I felt light-headed and stumbled, almost falling back onto the couch. “I didn’t go down there to help you. I went down there because you were being too loud.”
“I don’t believe you.”
The voices were getting louder, and I could hear they were panicked and screaming. The room was getting darker, and the floor felt like it was moving underneath me.
“Something happened,” I said. “Something terrible happened.”
“What—”
“Get out!” I shouted, and she jumped, almost dropping her glass. The heavy feeling was getting worse. Everything was slowing down. I heard a smash as the glass slipped out of my hands and hit the floor. I was hyper-ventilating and I couldn’t stop.
“Hey, are you okay?” Karen asked, getting up and reaching toward me. I slapped her hands aside and she backed away. I didn’t want her to see me like this. I didn’t want what I was seeing to be true.
“It’s not fair!” I screamed. She was looking at me like I’d gone nuts, but by then it was too late for me to even try to stop it.
I stepped back over a body lying on its back on the floor. Three other men with strange silvery eyes hunched over around him. One turned and raised his head, red, gristly meat clenched in his teeth as he tore away a long strip of rubbery skin.
This isn’t real.
The room disappeared. The voices became a roar as a stampede of men, women, and children charged around me and drowned out everything else. Their faces were burned, their clothing charred off their bodies. Some were bleeding; some were missing arms or legs, stumps flailing as they clawed their way past; some were impaled with pieces of metal, with their skin, bones, and guts torn away. They were screaming as they ran, screaming with eyes wide and blind with fear.
This isn’t real.
Pieces of glass and metal began raining down from the sky as they fought, pushing tighter and tighter against each other until they could no longer even punch or kick their way forward. They piled around me until there was nothing left but the stinking, shoving, and screaming, and I squeezed my eyes shut, clamping my hands over my ears.
“This isn’t real!” I shrieked, but it was and I knew it. It was real, and everyone was going to die, and everything was going to burn. Karen and me and Wachalowski and the dead woman . . . none of it mattered because it was all going to burn.
Calliope Flax—Bullrich Heights
By the time we got close to my place, I was so goddamn cold, Luis must have been freezing his second-tier nuts off. The buildings were jammed close together down my way, and no one ever came to plow any road except the main one, so snow was piled up in the places where people bothered to dig out. Down most side streets, the cars were buried ass to nose on both sides, stuck in ice until spring.
I took a left down Iranistan and steered the bike down the narrow path between the stuck cars. The building fronts were covered in graffiti, and half the windows were boarded up.
“How do they get to work?” Luis asked. I didn’t answer.
Up ahead was the old gun shop, or what was left of it, and for the first time in months, there were some guys in front of it. The Turkish guy who ran the market next to it was there in his wool hat, talking to two patrol cops with rifles. A third cop shoved the gun shop’s bent gate open and went in, while a black patrol car with tinted windows idled nearby. The shop used to deal stolen guns under the table and other shit too, but that was a long time ago. Since then it had been torched.
“Are there always so many patrols down here?” Luis asked.
“No.”
The black car gunned its engine when we got closer, and moved into the road to block our path.
Son of a . . .
We were stuck, so I hit the brakes and we slid to a stop a foot away from the armored front door. One of the two guys with the Turk came up to us with his hand out.
“Hands up,” he said as he came around the side of the car.
“What the hell?” I said. “What now? We’re just—”
“Hands over your heads! Do it!”
Luis’s went up the first time, I think, and I put m
ine up there too. This guy was tense, one hand on his gun when he came up. The other one was calling in.
“One vehicle, two passengers. Vehicle ID . . .”
The first one looked Luis over, then me.
“Where’s your ID?”
“In my jacket—”
I went to reach for it, and as soon as I moved my hand the gun went right in my face.
“Hands over your head!”
“Alright! Jesus—”
“Quiet!”
He unzipped the front of my coat and stuck his hand in, right to the lined pocket. He fished in there and pulled out my ID and both sets of knuckles. He checked the ID and scanned it, then looked back at his partner and shook his head.
“Negative,” the other guy said in the radio. “Both passengers were processed earlier today, and were stopped again across town less than an hour ago. . . .”
The goon held out my ID and both pairs of brass knuckles as the black car slammed into reverse and rolled back out of the way. It took a second for me to get that he was giving me my shit back, even the brass. I took it and stuck the lot back in my coat.
“Move along,” he said. Just like that; no fine, no ticket, no speech, just beat it. He stepped back and I went through.
“What was that all about?” Luis asked when they were out of earshot.
“No idea.”
“Something must have happened. They’re looking for someone.”
“Not us.”
He shut up and didn’t talk again until we got to my street. The buildings were mostly dark there, the concrete black from smog and the windows broken or boarded. Rusted chain link leaned around empty lots where new graffiti covered old graffiti. One titty bar-slashwhorehouse had some of the last lit neon, along with some shit-hole martial arts dojo to the left and up. I took us through the concrete pylons holding up the maglev rails that crossed between the housing units, then down between the huge piles of brown ice and snow, mixed with piles of trash bags and dead cars.
“This is where you live?”
“Down here.”
I pulled into my unit and down the ramp to the underground parking area that held two cars that ran, one that didn’t, and my bike. I cut the engine, kicked it, locked it, and armed it.
“Come on,” I said, climbing off and heading up.
The kid looked like he changed his mind, but it was too late for that now. He held up okay in jail, but now he looked twitchy.
“Take it easy,” I told him. “You’re okay.”
He didn’t look sure, but he tagged along after me when I buzzed in the back door and turned the bolt. Another badge at my unit, two more bolts, then the security bar slammed down in its track behind the door and I shoved it open.
“Come on in.”
He made a face when he went in, like he just saw a rat or worse. He stood right inside in front of the couch and stared.
“This is where you live?” he asked again.
“Yeah. Fuck you.”
“No, I know. It’s just—”
“Whatever,” I said. “You want the tour? That’s the kitchen, this is the TV room, the can is through there, and through there is where I sleep.”
“It’s so small,” he said.
I thought of his bathroom and how huge it was. You could see my whole place from the front door. The kitchen had a half fridge, two burners, a sink, and that was it. The TV area had the couch, the TV, a weight bench, and a heavy bag in the corner. The can had a shitter, a shower with industrial plastic sheeting, and a sink with all plain metal and no colored soap.
“Can I use your TV?” he asked.
“Knock yourself out.”
He turned it on and flipped. Not long after, he found what he was looking for.
“. . . the site of what witnesses describe as a suicide bombing, in broad daylight, right in the center of one of the city’s restaurant districts.”
It was total mayhem. The camera looked over the crowd, where cops were pushing people back. People all up and down the street had blood on their heads and faces, and there was glass everywhere.
“That’s why the patrols are out,” he said. “Shit . . .”
“If a bomb went off there, why look here?”
“They must be following some kind of lead. Holy shit, look at that,” he said, sitting down on the couch.
It was bad; I had to say that. The place got blown to shit. There were dead bodies all over.
“. . . took authorities several hours to completely quell the ensuing riot, which resulted in many more injuries, deaths, and damage to local property and businesses. Initial estimates place the damage in the millions. Mayor Ohtomo and his administration have been quick to respond, with plans to deploy the National Guard to prevent looting and other crimes of opportunity until the area can be completely secured. Given the range and impact of this attack, that will be no easy task. . . .”
Luis turned down the sound and got on his phone. He tapped his foot like a junkie.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m trying to reach Dr. Edward Cross, please.”
Someone babbled on the other end, but I couldn’t make it out.
“I know,” he said, “but it’s important. Would it be possible to have someone get him, or patch me through to the lab? I understand. You’re sure he’s there, though? He signed in? You’re sure he’s there? Okay, thanks.”
He hung up.
“Trying to reach your doctor?”
“He’s not that kind of doctor,” he said, eyes on the TV. “Anyway, he’s my uncle. Hey, you mind if I use the data miner?”
“The TV miner? Knock yourself out.” He typed away with his thumbs on the remote.
“You said you’d buy dinner,” I said.
“Sure, whatever you want.”
I watched him work the TV for a minute, until hits and lists popped up on the screen and he started typing in weird shit I’d never seen before and using stuff I didn’t know was in there.
“Don’t get me in trouble,” I said.
“I won’t.”
Promises.
Nico Wachalowski—FBI Home Office
People edged quickly past my desk as I checked for messages, and the normally quiet halls were filled with rapid-fire chatter. There was no word from Faye, Zoe, or any contacts that might provide a lead, just a battery of alerts and notifications marked high priority. A sweep was being set up that covered voice, text, and anything else they could think of. Any circuit that could have a tap shunted in was being monitored as computers sifted through the data, looking for leads. The scope of the effort was huge. So huge that just to get enough bodies on the street, an unprecedented number of revivors had been deployed to supplement foot soldiers at key points through the city. Whoever initiated the attack, they’d stirred up a hornet’s nest.
My ears were still ringing, and I could still smell the burned biochemical stink left behind by the revivor that had detonated the bomb. Nothing useful had survived, but pieces of it had been thrown as far as two blocks away. Fused components were being dug out of vehicles, concrete, and even victims caught in the blast. Initial reports indicated military-grade explosives in a configuration that maximized the blast radius, so whoever wired the revivor knew what he was doing. Despite the relatively small amount of charge, the force was devastating.
Getting out of the restaurant strip had been dicey. We were pinned down until riot control got there, and by then it was a war zone. The explosion had killed at least fifty-three people and wounded almost two hundred others; then another nine died in the riot that followed—five crushed or trampled, three from clashing with other citizens, and one choked with a police baton in the heat of the struggle. Even with escorts, getting Faye to the perimeter was a struggle.
The inventory had come in for the arsenal recovered from Tai’s base of operations. It included explosives that easily could have caused the kind of damage that occurred downtown. The bomb that killed all those people had come through Tai; I was sure of i
t. Whoever killed him was behind it.
I sat at my desk and watched the footage I had recorded from the interrogation earlier, the window floating behind my closed eyelids. Off to one side I kept a smaller window tapped into a camera that watched from the wall behind me, in case anyone came by.
“Answer her questions,” I heard myself say. Zoe was staring at the suspect, which I had pretty much expected. What color she had drained out of her face. If she was any paler, she could have been mistaken for a revivor.
Given the circumstances, I had switched off the camera in the interrogation room, and I didn’t disclose the POV recording I’d made myself either, but I wanted a record of the interview for my own use. When I first found out why she had really left the note, I had almost turned it off and sent her home. I was glad I hadn’t.
“Are you okay?” she asked in a small voice.
I remember taking a small amount of satisfaction in that. Honestly, I figured once she got a look at the guy, she’d turn around and that would be that. She did better than I expected, though.
“Who are you?” the guy asked.
I scanned forward, looking for the moment when she did whatever it was she did. When I saw her arms go down by her sides and her head start to drift forward, I stopped.
“—lax.”
“Screw you, you ugly little bitch!”
He spit and a glob of red squirted out at caught her right in the face. The camera rose as I knocked the chair back and moved toward him.
I wasn’t looking at her when it happened; I was looking at him. He was glaring at me with a defiant smirk, when all of a sudden his face changed. The smirk disappeared and his eyelids drooped.
“Sleep,” I heard her say, and his eyelids fluttered. They stayed open, but his eyes went out of focus. It was as if he suddenly had gone blind or something. I had scanned him, getting a bead on his vitals; his heartbeat had slowed, and he was totally relaxed. He seemed, in fact, to be very close to sleep.
The camera moved back to Zoe, my hand moving into frame with a paper towel. I froze the image.
She was staring at the guy, her pupils almost completely dilated, like she was loaded on amphetamines. Her face had changed dramatically. I remember thinking that at the time, too. When she first came in, she was nervous, shy almost to the point of paralysis, despite the fact that she had clearly been drinking. Her eyes were always cast downward at the floor, at her shoes, or at her hands. Now she was staring right at someone she knew to be a killer, looking him right in the eyes. It was like a pair of invisible beams connected her eyes to his and neither one could look away, but looking at her face again now, I could see who was in control. She could have looked away at any time, but he couldn’t have. Not until she let him. It was like a completely different personality had emerged from inside her, and the expression in her eyes as she stared at him from over that beaky nose was something that didn’t seem to belong there.
