by B. V. Larson
“What were you going to say?” Holly asked.
“Look, Jenna isn’t my girlfriend. I’ve been helping her find her husband, who stepped into one of those rips and never came out again.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s different. So there’s nothing between you two?”
“There have been some emotional moments. I’ve hugged her—you know, to comfort her.”
“I see,” Holly said. Her voice had turned cooler again, but not angry, not icy. Wary. Finally, she sighed. “I’m sorry then. I’m just tired of players, you know? I’ve been messed with too many times.”
I wanted to tell her I’d been under the impression we’d had some casual fun the night before, and I hadn’t figured we’d gotten engaged yet. But none of those words would help me, so I didn’t bother. Instead, I told her a heavily edited story about my day. I left out unpleasant details like shooting McKesson in the shoulder.
“I could use your help,” she said when I was finished. “I need to go back to the apartment and get my stuff. Just a few things.”
“You mean the money, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Haven’t you slipped back inside and gathered all that hidden cash up yet?”
“I tried, but they put up a new door and the cops have it taped up. My key didn’t work. But I know you can get in.”
“Yeah, OK,” I said. “Come pick me up.”
I gave her the address and ten minutes later we were driving in her car. She was quiet at first and I thought she was still angry. I thought about giving her an apology, but I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong. We drove quietly through town in sparse traffic.
Holly let out a heavy sigh. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s all right,” I said, thinking she meant her tirade concerning Jenna. “I understand the confusion.”
“No, not about—whoever.”
“What then?”
She paused for a moment, as if struggling with words. “You’ve been very nice, Quentin,” she said at last. “You don’t deserve someone like me in your life, that’s the truth.”
I glanced at her. I didn’t know what to say, so I kept quiet.
“Remember when we first met?” she asked.
“Sure, at Tony’s.”
“I didn’t show up there by accident. I was sent there.”
Alarm bells went off in my head. I recalled thinking Holly’s appearance was a big coincidence at the time, but I’d somehow forgotten about that. I began to worry. Maybe I wasn’t paranoid enough.
“Who sent you?”
“Gilling.”
Slowly, I nodded my head. “Why’d he send you?”
“To find and steal the sunglasses. To find Tony’s stuff—whatever he had. Instead, I found you.”
My head began to pound. She’d been working for the cultists. “That’s why I found you in his basement, then? Because you failed to rip me off?”
“I didn’t plan to rip you off. I didn’t know it was going to be you I met at Tony’s place.”
“Why did Gilling chain you in his cellar?”
“I think he was trying scare me into giving his money back. But I’d already spent it by that time, even though I didn’t bring him what he wanted.”
“Let me get this straight, you took money to snuggle up to me and take my objects?”
Holly shook her head and reached out a hand to touch my arm. “No. It wasn’t like that. I went down there to look around for the sunglasses. You had them, so I followed you around for a while. But I never tried to take them. I guess you kind of grew on me. Anyway, Gilling became tired of waiting and grabbed me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this when I found you in the basement?”
She shrugged and looked embarrassed. “I don’t know. I liked you. I didn’t want you to dump me.”
I wasn’t sure what I felt about Holly now. I fumed all the way to her apartment door.
“Are we still friends?” she asked me quietly, standing there in the dark.
I nodded after a moment. “Yeah.”
I worked my magic on the door and it popped open. I had time to give Holly a smug smile. She kissed me on the cheek and pushed her way through a mile of yellow tape and stepped inside.
I should have been on my guard. I should have gone in with my gun in my hand—but I didn’t. I was too busy thinking about Holly and impressing her with my little sunglasses trick.
The Gray Men were waiting for us.
The door had been sealed, but of course that didn’t matter to them. They could go anywhere they wanted. The first Gray Man was standing right there in front of the coffee table as we stepped inside and snapped on the lights. Only, it was a Gray Woman this time. She was the first alien female I’d encountered—unless Ezzie counted. I was surprised, even though I shouldn’t have been. She wore a hood, as had others I’d seen. I noticed her hands didn’t have spurs on the backs of them. Perhaps the females of the species didn’t get spurs.
In the split second before I fumbled in my pocket for my gun, I realized the alien was examining objects on the coffee table. She had Holly’s TV remote in her hands, holding it high. She ran some kind of cube-shaped, metallic device over it. The metal seemed to shine and twist in her hand as she scanned the TV remote with it. I had no doubt it was some kind of scientific instrument.
“Hey, that’s mine,” Holly said, reaching for the remote. I came in behind her, and I had my gun out now, but no clear shot with Holly in the way.
The alien glanced at us, and Holly froze. I think she hadn’t realized the stranger wasn’t human until that moment. She hadn’t seen the gray fingers and understood what they meant. The eyes were particularly strange—they were gray as well, but looked more like silver due to being wet. The hood slipped away from the head, and I got a good look at her. There was no hair on her head. None at all. A smooth gray skin covered everything except those eyes.
I took aim. But that’s when something touched my head from behind. It touched me just behind the ear. A blinding jolt of pain and numbness filled me. I tumbled forward, passing out. I stayed conscious long enough to see the second alien step over me and grab Holly, applying his weapon to her skull as well.
I wanted to rise. I wanted to pull out my gun and shoot them both—but everything went black before I could do anything further.
When I woke up, I could barely breathe and couldn’t move my limbs. For a good minute, my arms wouldn’t obey me. I figured I’d been shocked—or something like it. My nerves weren’t operating properly. I dragged myself up with legs that flopped and stung like they’d been bloodless for several minutes. Slowly, with a great deal of unpleasant tingling, my body began to function again. I sat down on the couch, rubbing my head. I didn’t see any sign of the Gray Men or Holly.
As soon as my mind was working again, I located my possessions. They were all there: the photo, the sunglasses, the ring, and the finger around my neck. They hadn’t even taken my gun. I found that strange, but I didn’t have time to puzzle it out now.
When I could stand, I stumbled through the apartment calling for Holly. There was only one bedroom, and I found the rip there. It was shrinking already, the colors those of a dying flame. I could see through the rip this time—which was good. Unlike with Gilling’s failures, I at least had some warning as to what I was going to find at the other end. I also assumed that I would be able to return—if I moved quickly enough.
I opened up my cell and called McKesson.
“Jay here,” he answered.
“Detective? It’s Draith.”
“Talk fast.”
“They’ve got Holly. The Gray Men were in her apartment—two of them at least.”
“Oh, so that’s where I’m headed,” he said. “Thanks for the tip.”
I realized he must be coming here already, having followed the directions of his watch. “They knocked me out and stepped back out,” I said. “They must have taken her with them.”
“B
ut not you, eh? How come nothing ever happens to you? Are you sure you aren’t the one on the wrong side, Draith?”
“Screw you.”
“Just a question. Stay there. I’ll arrive in one minute flat.”
“No chance,” I said. “I’m stepping out after her.”
I closed the cell phone and never heard if he liked the idea or not. I didn’t care. I only hesitated for one second further before I stepped into the rip. It was like cliff-diving—the best approach was not to think about the craziness of what you were doing. Once inside the blurred region of air, which hovered directly over Holly’s bed, I was able to keep moving forward. My shoes soon crunched on desert sand.
The scene that appeared to me was both familiar and strange. As before, it greatly resembled the open desert of southern Nevada, but without the structures of man. Instead, a building stood nearby built all of randomly stacked cubes. Windowless and opaque, the structure loomed perhaps a hundred feet high. Off to my left—possibly to the east, was another, much larger structure. That was the city I’d seen before. A stack of cubes so huge it matched the mountains in the region for size and height.
None of that mattered to me, however, because Holly lay on the ground at my feet. She had been stripped to her skin, and all of her belongings were missing. Even her earrings had been ripped out. Both her earlobes trickled blood.
I knelt beside her, cradled her head, and spoke to her, but I already knew the truth. There was more blood pooled under her body, caking up the sands. They had shot her through the heart several times.
My eyes stung, but I couldn’t seem to shed a tear. I wasn’t just sad, I was angry, furious. Holly had shared the only life I knew and now she was dead, and I didn’t know the reason for it. What if there wasn’t a reason for it?
“Why you and not me?” I asked no one.
I gazed toward the cubical stack. They had to have gone there. It was less than a mile away. I didn’t see a vehicle, but there were footprints and a single, wide swath in the sand. The strange track led away from this place back toward the smaller pile of cubes. It looked like the sort of track a bulldozer would leave behind.
I tried to think clearly, to plan my next move, but it was difficult. We hadn’t known one another long, but I definitely felt something for Holly.
They’d stripped her, presumably to figure out whether any of her possessions were objects, and then shot her and dumped her here. They’d taken everything from her, looking for objects, but left mine alone. Why?
For the first time, I wondered if my amnesia had been induced by trauma. Had I lost too many friends in just such a manner? Had it broken my mind and left me unable to recall any of it after the accident? I couldn’t be sure.
I wanted revenge, of course. I burned for it. Not just for Holly, but for all the rest of them. For people I couldn’t remember and for those I didn’t know well. For future victims, of which I was sure there would be many.
Did I have a chance, given the odds? No, but I stepped onto the path toward the cubes anyway.
“Don’t do it, Draith,” called a familiar voice. “It’s not the right time.”
I glanced back to see McKesson. He’d stepped through the rip and stood on the sands behind me.
“That’s a murder victim,” I said. “You’re a detective. I could use your help.”
For once, McKesson didn’t have his usual sarcastic swagger. “We can’t win,” he said. “Not here, not now. This is their territory. They outnumber us a billion to one.”
McKesson knelt beside Holly, checking her pulse. His hand fell away.
“A sad waste,” he said. “She’s the hooker who found you the night of the accident, right?”
“Holly wasn’t a hooker,” I said angrily.
“Yeah, OK. Be cool.”
“Let’s do something about it,” I said. I lifted my .32 auto and looked at him seriously.
“Two pistols against a building full of armed aliens?” he asked. “Like I said, I fight when the odds are in my favor, Draith. Come back home with me. This rip is going to fade soon.”
“I’m not letting them get away with this.”
McKesson suddenly grew angry. “All right, fine. Go on. March over there and die. They’re watching us right now, you know. They aren’t fools.”
“They’d have shot us by now if they could.”
“Maybe. Or maybe we’re part of their plan. They could have killed us by now.”
“You don’t even care? You just cover their tracks and let more people die? Why not expose them, set up an army of cops to blow them away the next time they step through?”
McKesson rubbed his face. “It might turn out that way, someday. I’m getting tired of these Gray Men, same as you are. But for now, I’ve got my orders.”
It always came down to that. No matter how many times we teamed up, McKesson could never get out from under his mysterious bosses.
“Who gives them?”
He shook his head, refusing to answer.
“I should shoot you again,” I said.
“I’ve still got a bruise the size of Delaware from the last time you did.”
I glanced at his right shoulder. He seemed to be favoring it. I hoped it hurt a lot.
“Are you at least going to help me carry her body home?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, glancing back toward the rip, which was turning orange now and seemed to be moving more slowly. “But let’s hurry. This thing is about to die.”
We carried Holly back home together, and as I felt her cooling skin against my palms, I swore I would have my pound of flesh. I supposed that was the way all wars escalated, but I didn’t care. She looked very young and as if she were just sleeping. Which made it worse.
McKesson insisted on dressing her in a robe before we called the cops. “It already looks enough like a sex crime,” he explained.
This just seemed to add insult to injury and made me madder. “So the hell what?”
“You are a boyfriend. Even with me helping out, you might spend a few days being sweated by the guys downtown. I don’t run the whole department. Which way do you want it?”
I shook my head and went to the closet to search. Everything Holly owned in the way of bed wear was sexy. There were silk pieces and satin pieces—I took a short robe of lavender satin because at least it wasn’t see-through. Even though the point was not just to help me, but to give her some dignity, it all felt wrong. Here I was, helping a detective alter evidence at the scene of a crime. I wondered how many things like this happened every day. I hoped the count was low. I brought him the satin robe and held it out to him.
“You put it on her,” he said. “I’m not touching anything in this place. They’ll have to dust her for prints. You have an excuse as the boyfriend.”
I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation, with Holly dead less than an hour.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said. “There are no bullet holes in the robe.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Yeah, it does. How can you not know that? Any coroner will know the body was moved.”
McKesson stepped close to me and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You have to trust me,” he said. “That’s not how it’s going to happen. All I need is good photos of her with some clothes on.”
I stared at him, hating what he was implying—that more people were in on this. I realized that he had to be right. It couldn’t be just McKesson cleaning things up by himself. He had to have help within the department to get away with these cover-ups. Still, I didn’t think he was behind any of these events; he was caught up in them as much as I was.
“What do they pay you to do all this?” I asked him.
“Not enough.”
In the end, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t push Holly’s dead arms into the robe. Instead, I pulled a sheet from the bed and draped it over her.
“This is going to make it harder to clear you,” McKesson complained
.
“You’ll manage,” I said, heading for the door.
“Hold on a second. I need a statement.”
“Make it up.”
“C’mon, Draith, give me something.”
“OK, you want a statement? Here’s a statement. Holly wasn’t a hooker. She was a friend of mine. And now she’s dead, and I don’t know why.”
I walked out the door and slammed it behind me.
Maybe it wasn’t right to take Holly’s car to visit Jenna, but I needed to see a familiar face, someone who I thought understood me, at least a little. I also just couldn’t bring myself to hail another cab. I wanted to be alone for a while, trying hard not to think of Holly. As I drove, something McKesson had said came back to me. He’d said these objects never brought you happiness. They attracted trouble and each other. And people who carried more than one of them generally ended up dead—really fast. I had to admit, of all the bullshit I’d heard out of him, that part was certainly true.
I found Jenna’s room at the hotel and let myself in. It was more than rude of me, I knew, but I was starting to get lost again, seeing in memory Holly’s dead body in the desert. I knew there was no escaping the impact of that, but perhaps talking to Jenna would distract me for a while.
Maybe it was selfish of me to come see Jenna. It had occurred to me that I should stay away from her, that I was possibly endangering her life by coming back to her. But I also knew that friends died when I wasn’t there to protect them too.
I stood in the half-light coming in from the bathroom, watching her sleep. She was pretty—in a different way than Holly had been. She was sexy too, but had a certain innocence about her. I thought about waking her up, or taking a shower, or simply lying down beside her and falling asleep. In the end, the minibar captured my attention. I opened it and built myself a water glass full of clear and tan liquids.
