“What’s your brother do?” said Ed. “Is he in sales or something?”
“Nah,” said Ricky. “He’s an attorney. But he wants to get into the music business.”
Their burgers were ready a few minutes later. The restaurant was eerily silent as they all ate, except for the sound of seven people chewing in unison. A single man was working in the back; he had taken the orders and cooked the burgers, and was now mopping the floor.
“Norris,” Ed asked the one with the cap. “Where’re you from?”
“Pittsburgh,” Norris answered with a full mouth. He didn’t seem to want to talk. There was something about his manner that made Ed uncomfortable.
“You came here because you dreamed about me too?”
Norris nodded and swallowed his food. “Yeah.” He looked like he was about to say more, but then he took another bite.
“Everybody had different dreams,” said Penny, “but they were all about you.”
“And how did you all find me here?”
Penny and Norris both shrugged. “I just had a feeling,” said Ricky. “Like if I came to New York, I’d find you eventually. I drew pictures of you all around in case you saw them.”
“I saw them,” said Ed. “You’re a pretty good artist.”
Ricky turned red again.
Norris removed his cap, scratched his head, and put the hat back on. The hair underneath looked like it was beyond the point where washing it would do any good. “You never told us how you did it,” he said, a little sullenly. “How did you make us all dream about you?”
“And why?” asked Penny. “Why did you choose us?”
Ed chewed slowly and took a sip of his Coke. “That’s a big question,” he said at last. “As for why, it was self-defense. Someone was trying to steal my memories, so I put them in other people’s minds to keep them safe. I didn’t really choose you…” They all looked disappointed, so he quickly added, “That is, not intentionally. Maybe there was something about your minds that was somehow compatible with mine.” That cheered them up.
“Was it just us?” asked Ricky. “How many people have your memories in their heads?”
Ed had sometimes wondered the same thing. “There were others. A lot, I think. But only a few of you came here.”
“Maybe the rest are still on their way,” said Penny.
“As for how,” Ed went on, “that’s harder to explain. I could probably show you, but…”
Ricky’s eyes went wide with excitement. “You can?”
“Like the Wheelchair Man taught you?” said Penny.
“Well,” said Ed, “the Guru didn’t teach me much. It was Nathaniel who showed me how to plant memories. But he’s… he’s not someone you ever want to meet. That’s why I can’t take you to the forest. Nathaniel’s out there, and he’s too dangerous to mess with. Not to mention the three-headed man.”
The three of them deflated visibly at that, like parade balloons with the air leaking out.
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” he went on. “But I have enemies. Nasty ones.”
Ricky was defiant. “Show us this place, and I bet we can stand up to this Nathaniel and the… how many heads did you say?”
“Yeah,” Penny put in, squishing a French fry in her fist. “There’s, like, six of us Eddites! We can smoosh ’em.”
Eddites? Ed decided to let that pass. “Nathaniel’s got people too. Blue ones.”
Ricky looked impressed. “Does this three-headed guy have people too?”
“I’m sure he does,” said Ed. “But so far he hasn’t come after me. If he ever figures out where I am, we’ll probably know about it pretty―”
He was interrupted by a boom that shook the floor and rattled the windows. Ed and the others hurried to the window to look outside. The street was lit by an orange glow. It seemed to be originating around the corner, somewhere near his apartment building. For a moment he was sure the giant had arrived, just as it had in his dream, but he dismissed that as nonsense and ran out of the restaurant. His Eddites all came after him.
A wave of heat hit him as he rounded the corner. He stopped and stared at the scene. His building was on fire. There was a gaping hole in the side of the building, and the street was dotted with chunks of brick and concrete that had been shattered by the explosion. The fire already appeared to be dying down; the flames receded, but soon a thick black smoke began to pour out of the hole in the wall. Firemen were on the scene already, rushing up the steps and into the building with axes in their hands. A few people came out into the street, looking sleepy and confused.
“That’s your apartment, Blake,” said Ricky, pointing to the smoking hole in the building. Ed could see that he was right. “Somebody just tried to blow you up.”
They watched for a few minutes as several police officers arrived and began clearing the area. They were talking to all the people who came out of the building, comforting them and taking them well away from the site of the danger. More people were coming out of other buildings nearby, and the police were talking to them, too. “Homemade bomb,” one of the policemen was saying to an old woman who was shivering in her nightgown. “Probably went off by accident. There’s no more danger.”
There was a sound off in the distance that bothered Ed for some reason, although he wasn’t sure why. All he could do was watch in horror as survivors fled the smoking building, still in their pajamas. How many had not survived?
“The firemen got here quick,” Penny said.
That high-pitched sound was getting louder. Sirens in the distance. Something wasn’t right about that. It took a long time for the thought to form. “I need to go,” he said, so quietly that only Ricky could hear him.
“What’s wrong?” Ricky asked.
“Sirens,” he said. “Do you hear them?”
“Of course there are sirens. There’s a fire!”
“They got here too fast,” said Penny. “Don’t you see? The real firemen are on their way. These guys…” She trailed off, watching as another group of firefighters went into the building. “They didn’t come in a truck. They don’t have any hoses. And I’ll bet you those cops are fake, too.”
Ed had already come to the same conclusion. He and the others were far enough up the block that they hadn’t attracted anyone’s notice yet. But just then, one of the policemen saw them. Ed turned and walked away, breaking into a run as soon as he was around the corner.
It had been a while since he’d run any great distance. He was winded after two blocks and practically dying after three, his right leg throbbing. His followers came after him and soon overtook him, so he found that he was the one following them. After the fourth block, he had to hide in an alley to catch his breath. The alley smelled like garbage. Ricky joined him, and soon the rest of his people were all crowded in the alley with him, panting and chattering excitedly about the adventure they were having. Ed did a quick count and found that there were only five. The lanky, muttering man was nowhere to be seen.
“I think we should keep running,” Ricky said, peeking very carefully around the corner.
“Do you see them?” Ed asked between gulps of air.
Ricky shook his head. “Who do you think they are?”
Ed thought of his dream. The three-headed giant, setting fires and killing. “Urizen,” he whispered. “The firemen work for the man with three heads. He’s found me.”
“Then I really think we should keep running.”
Ed held up a hand, signaling for Ricky to hang on a second while he coughed up a whole lot of material from the depths of his lungs. “Pay phone,” he said finally.
“Pay phone?”
“I need―” More coughing. “I need to make a call.”
There was a phone booth at the next intersection. Ed made the others wait while he and Ricky went there. When they got to the phone, they both realized that neither one had a dime, so they had to go back to the alley. The one named Tim dug a dime out of his pocket and handed it over, and
Ed went with Ricky back to the phone again. Ed got into the phone booth and was about to shut the door when Ricky came in to join him.
“Gosh,” said Ricky, “these booths are small.”
“They’re made for one,” Ed replied. Ricky smelled strongly of body odor and hamburgers.
The phone rang a long time before someone picked up. “Wei,” said a man’s voice.
“Mr. Fu, it’s Ed.”
“I don’t want any insurance,” Fu said groggily.
“Fu, wake up. It’s Ed.
“Ed? Whassamatter?”
“Get everybody up. I’ve been found. Remember our plan?”
He could hear the big man slapping his own face to wake up. “Our plan!”
“Do you remember it?”
There was a long pause. “Did we have a plan?”
Ed looked through the filthy glass of the phone booth and saw a dark figure emerge from the shadows some distance down the street. It was a man in a three-piece suit, and something about him filled Ed with terror. “Our plan,” he said. “Forget it. I’ll talk to you when I get there.” He hung up the phone and then spent some time in negotiations with Ricky to get the phone booth door open.
“Now what?” Ricky asked him.
Ed thought of Sarah. He needed to find a way to warn her not to go to their apartment. Would they find her anyway? Urizen evidently had ways of finding people.
The man in the suit crossed the street a block away. He was looking down every alley, but had not yet seen Ed and Ricky. There would be other searchers, but somehow Ed was sure this was the one he had to watch out for. “Go round everyone up and tell them to go home to your families. He’s after me, not you. You’ll be safe if you get out of here now.”
“Are you kidding? We’re not leaving you.”
“I’ll be fine.” A wave of dizziness struck him suddenly, and it felt like a dark cloud was dimming his eyesight. The man in the suit was coming closer. “I have a safe place to go.”
“Then we’re all going with you.”
Ed wanted to argue, to make them leave him alone, but the sudden dizziness made it hard to think. “Bonnie Meadow Road,” he said. He felt the street tipping sideways and feared that he would soon slide away into the shadows. “New Rochelle. I have a friend. We can all hide there.” He took two steps, tripped on a crack in the sidewalk, and smacked his head on the ground. As his spirit floated upward, he watched from above as Ricky and the others picked up his unconscious body and carried him away.
18
Monkeys
Danny forged a path westward through the jungle, with his Army-issue buttpack and the radio strapped to his back. He remained dressed in the simple clothes he’d worn while living in the village, having left his uniform in the cave on the hill. He had no idea how far into Cambodia he had hiked. The terrain was difficult in those first few days, but after a while it leveled out and his progress improved. There were more streams to cross, and he thought there must be a larger stream or river somewhere up ahead.
For several days he saw no sign of human life. There were only bugs and lizards, and occasionally something bigger roaming just out of sight. He was armed with a Soviet AK-47 rifle and two handguns, along with as much ammunition as he could carry. He foraged or hunted when he was hungry. Every evening he found a sheltered spot to camp out and then turned on the radio to call Les.
“Damned if I know,” Les said testily after Danny asked him once again where he was going. “I keep telling you, and I keep telling you, I don’t know. Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same thing another hundred times. I don’t know.”
Danny had been under a great deal of stress lately. There were times when he was able to deal with his stress, push it aside and keep it from bubbling over. There were other times when it all became too much and he felt like he had reached a breaking point. Tonight was one of the latter. He stood up, picked up the radio with both hands, and flung it as far as he could. It hit the ground with a crunching sound, much like the sound of broken things being shaken inside a metal box, and tumbled some distance before it came to a stop in a puddle of mud. He took a moment to compose himself, then went over to get it. There was a fresh dent in the case and one of the knobs had broken off. Ignoring this, he put the handset to his ear and said, “You still there, Les?”
“Still here. Sorry to yell at you, man.”
“I’m all alone out here. You’re all I’ve got.”
“Don’t be throwing your radio around, then.”
“Go to hell.”
Lester laughed. “That’s the spirit. I wish I had more answers for you. I only know what I know, you know?”
“Are you somewhere nearby?” said Danny. “I’ve been thinking. You must be somewhere close by for my radio to pick up your signal.”
“Your radio’s broken.”
“That’s not what I asked. Where are you?”
Lester sighed a long, drawn-out sigh. “I don’t want you to know too much about me. Knowing will just make things worse for you after they pull you out of the hole.”
“What hole?” Danny frowned at the broken radio.
“Never mind. I just think you’re better off not knowing things that might work against you.”
Danny wished more than anything that he still had some cigarettes. “I’m gonna die here, aren’t I?”
“You’re not.”
He thought of his mother and sister. His eyes suddenly began to sting; he scrubbed at them with the back of one hand. “There’s no surviving this. I’m never going home.”
“Danny, I have a reasonable expectation that you will not die in Cambodia.”
“You’re just trying to cheer me up.”
“It’s nothing to be cheerful about. You’ll be in worse places than this before it’s all over. Much worse.”
The next afternoon, as the sun peeked through the clouds just before sinking below the horizon, he came to a small collection of thatched huts. It looked almost like Blueberry’s village, but it gave him a bad feeling. Everything seemed to be in good condition, as though the place had been occupied not long before, but he found no people there.
What he did find disturbed him a great deal. Inside one of the huts was a bamboo cage, about four feet high. The bars of the cage had dark brown stains on them that Danny thought might be blood. A few feet from the cage he found a pile of human fingernails—not clippings, but entire fingernails. He found two huts that appeared to be cells, with bamboo latches on the doors. In one of these he found minuscule letters carved into the wall—a tiny message that said, simply, PLEASE GOD HELP. On the ground beneath the sign he found something that turned his stomach. He ran outside and spent a minute trying not to throw up.
As he was recovering, Danny heard a sound in the woods nearby. He had his rifle at the ready in an instant, aimed at the dark jungle, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Still, he watched and waited for at least two minutes before he lowered his rifle and reminded himself to breathe.
Stupid to be out in the open, he thought. If the owners of this camp were still nearby, he was an easy target. They might just be out collecting food. So, still casting glances at the jungle, he began walking toward the cover of a nearby thicket of bamboo.
When the Wet Dogs were still together, Lieutenant Lonnie had had only a few pieces of advice for his troops. “Spread out” was the first one, because staying close meant that the enemy would be able to take out a group of GIs with a short burst of fire or a single grenade. “Watch your step” was second on his list, because Lonnie had been instilled with a healthy fear of claymores and other explosive surprises. Danny did not have to worry about the first bit of advice, being on his own. But the second one still applied, and he realized a moment too late that he had been looking back when he should have been looking forward. Where his foot expected to find the ground, it instead found nothing at all. He arrived quite suddenly at the bottom of a deep hole in the ground, with no idea how he got there. His rifle was not down t
here with him. He must have dropped it when he’d fallen. A painful knot was forming on the back of his head and he felt woozy.
The camp was built on low ground, close to the water table, so the bottom of the hole was filled with warm, stagnant water. He was sitting waist-deep in it. Not just water; from the smell, he surmised that prisoners had been kept in this hole before. His buttpack was already completely submerged, so he took it off. The radio was wet too, but he’d learned from Volpe long ago that the PRC-25 could be completely immersed in a river, dried off, and used again. And the thing had been broken for weeks anyway.
The hole was roughly cylindrical, five feet in diameter and something like ten feet deep. Its walls were lined with some kind of brick. A word bubbled up out of his memory, a term he had learned in high school while reading Ivanhoe. Oubliette. He had fallen into an oubliette. A place where a prisoner could be dropped in and forgotten. He could still hear his twelfth-grade English teacher saying the word in her southern drawl. Oubliette.
Happily, this oubliette didn’t seem to be a particularly secure trap. The walls were smooth, but the top of the hole was only a couple feet out of his reach. He could almost have reached it just by jumping, if the ground were dry. The pit had been designed, he guessed, to hold prisoners who were under guard, so its designers had not anticipated that an unguarded prisoner might try to climb out. Jumping did not do him much good, since the water on the ground made it hard to get much height. So, breathing through his mouth to avoid the smell (although this was not very effective), he pushed his feet into the wall, braced his back against the opposite side, and began to lever himself upward.
What he had failed to plan for was the slippery nature of the walls. The mud formed a slimy coating on the smooth surface. Soon he was entirely covered by the stinking sludge. He had once watched a television show in which men tried to climb a greased pole to win a prize. This was just like that television show, except those men on TV had not been in danger of dying. Already he was thirsty, and his canteen was nearly empty. With all the streams around, he had grown lazy in refilling it.
The Music of the Machine (The Book of Terwilliger 2) Page 26
