by David Wong
Of course, I followed. I stepped into the room and saw the little girl melt into a puddle of black oil. The blackness rose and took shape and I began to consider that I had made a mistake.
I started to back out of the room, realizing the two guys pissing at the urinals nearby didn’t even acknowledge any of this. Suddenly the black shape sprung at me and for a second, all I could see was darkness.
THE AIR STANK. My ankles were submerged in cold liquid that sloshed when I moved my feet. I blinked and could almost see I was in a doorless room. I reached out and touched a metal wall. I could see only by two small spots of orange light and I realized with horror that it was the shadow creature’s eyes. There was a steady rumbling sound from all around us and I had to brace myself as the floor seemed to shift and tilt under me. The black thing stood at the end of the room and stared.
“Where are we?” I asked, to see if it would respond more than anything else.
The answer did not come in the form of an audible voice, but a picture. In a blink I had a perfect, mental image of an airliner and of a spot under the passenger compartment where a large center fuel tank was housed. I was standing inside the center fuel tank of a passenger jet. The liquid at my feet was jet fuel. I also knew with some certainty that this was Amy’s plane, that I was standing just a few feet under the spot where she was sitting and likely striking up a conversation with whoever she was seated with.
Strangely, the first thought that came to me—even before “Am I really here?”—was that they had forgotten to fill up this tank. Then the answer came to me that they often leave it empty depending on the distance and load of the flight. Then I realized how creepy it was that I was having this telepathic conversation with this thing and I made an effort to close my mind to it.
The shadow thing moved. It drifted like a puff of smoke in a mild breeze, stopping near a bulky apparatus that emerged from the ceiling and dangled to the floor, probably an instrument for measuring how much fuel was left. The fumes were burning my eyes and nose and lungs. It was making me light-headed. The black thing drifted to the apparatus, swirled a black appendage over and around a conduit, a jointed line that probably housed an electrical wire. The black thing caressed the line, almost sensually. Sparks flew from the conduit.
I screamed.
I TURNED TO Arnie and said, “There was light and heat and noise. A sound like a junkyard falling down a mountain.”
I concentrated, tried to bring back the memory. That very real feeling of my flesh burning to vapor in a millisecond, my bones cooking to black charcoal. But I couldn’t, not really. The memory was hazy and unreal, like the memories of the hamster we owned when I was five, the one that escaped and then got eaten by a snapping turtle. I can’t picture it, but I know it was there. And that it wasn’t very fast.
“And then,” I said, “everything was back the way it was. I was standing there again, in the dark, shoes and socks soaked in that stinking, ice-cold liquid. To say it was a weird feeling doesn’t do it justice, because at that moment I had a distinct memory of the explosion happening and an equally clear memory of it not happening.”
This seemed to confuse Arnie, understandably enough. He said, “So, did the plane go down or not?”
“No.” I paused for a moment and said, “It didn’t. Not yet.”
This confused Arnie further, but he waited patiently for me to explain. A good reporter, down to the last.
I said, “And as I was standing there, in the stench and the darkness, a thought came into my head, perfect and clear. The voice of that thing, the shadow man. ‘This moment,’ it said, ‘is forever.’ And I understood right then that all moments are forever and that they can go back there to that spot at any time, in the wet, stinking belly of that plane. They can go back and short that wire or jam open some valve and blow Amy out of the air along with two hundred other people. But that ain’t so strange, is it? You drive to the doctor’s office to hear the results of your X-ray and you pray that it isn’t cancer. Isn’t that what you’re praying for, that God will reach back in the past? Back before the X-ray was taken, before you even saw the doctor. Months before, so He can stop that tumor from forming in the first place?”
Arnie nodded and said, “Only this was the opposite, right? A threat. They were tellin’ you they can go back and make bad things happen, take your girl out of the equation. Anytime they want. So you wake up someday and see empty bed beside you and say, ‘Gosh, it’s a pity Amy died in that plane crash all those years ago.’ And you look and see all the headlines have changed and all those lives are lost and history is tweaked. Changed to suit their needs.”
I said, “You do catch on, Arnie. It takes a little time, but you do catch on.”
“And the message,” he continued, “was that you need to back off. ’Cause why else make the threat? They were saying you need to stop interfering with whatever plans they got, because if not they’ll go back and cut Amy out of the timeline.”
I started to speak, couldn’t, then swallowed and finally said, “You see, I screwed it up. I had it just right in the beginning, I had no connections. No family, no money, no career, no nothin’. What could they do to me? What could they take from me? But all that changed with Amy. Now they’ve got me, now they’ve got a hold on me. And I see her and she’d look up at me with those green eyes and I think, hey, saving the world, that’s Hollywood bullshit. The best I can do is save this little bit of the world, this little corner that me and this girl stand in. And every time I think that, somewhere I can hear laughter. Them laughing. Like the game is over, check and mate.”
Arnie said, “And you never ate her?”
“What?”
“You never turned into a monster and ate her?”
“No. I’ve never turned into a monster at all.” I thought for a moment and said, “As far as I know.”
“But you’re going to?”
I shrugged. Arnie let out a breath, then stood up off the floor and brushed off his pants with his hands. He said, “I don’t know what this’ll mean to ya, in light of what you just said. But I think you should hear it.”
“Are you going to tell me everything this time, Arnie? The real reason you’re here? Because I’m gonna tell you now, if you do decide to write all this up as a feature article it’s gonna suck.”
“For the purposes of what I’m gonna say,” Arnie began, “we’re gonna start with the premise that the shadow people are real, okay? Not that I’m convinced, but just for the purpose of what I’m about to say.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“And that time don’t mean the same thing to them as it means to you and me. And, like you said, they can reach backward and pull you right out of the past and present and everything and nobody is the wiser.”
“Right, right.” I motioned impatiently for him to go on.
“So how far back do you think they could go? Could they go back and vanish the guy who cured polio?”
“Oh. I don’t—I don’t think so.”
“But say they worked it like links in a chain, they touch the guy who pulled Bill Gates out of a car wreck thirty years ago. Make it so that guy was never born, so he could never save Gates. Gates dies as a child and tomorrow we wake up in a world where everybody is using Macs?”
I shivered. “Oh. I don’t know, Arnie. Do you?”
“You mentioned earlier that you got a box on your TV that you play games on? The games where you wander around and shoot people?”
“Well, John’s does. He’s got six of them, if you count the ones in his closet. A PlayStation and an Xbox and whatever else they sell.”
Arnie nodded. “Those names mean nothin’ to me. Tell me, you don’t find anything weird about it? Don’t get a funny feeling when you play on those things?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. Not really.”
Arnie, said, “The first time I saw one of those game machines was a month ago. And then, everybody had one.”
He waited, but I didn’t reply.
“I got a nephew,” continued Arnie. “Eleven years old. He’s all about comics and his remote-controlled cars and Rob Schneider movies. But a few weeks ago I come home and I see him sittin’ on the couch, leaning forward like he’s entranced. I mean, I never saw concentration like that on a kid’s face. Never. And he’s got this plastic thing in his hands with buttons on it and he’s just hammering away. And I turn to the television and I almost get sick. There’s just a gun barrel on the screen, at the bottom, muzzle flash shootin’ out the end and people getting ripped to shreds. Sprays of blood everywhere. And I realize, with a feeling like I ate something rotten, that he’s controlling the gun. He’s sitting there operating a damned murder simulator and his mom comes in and tells him to say hi, that his uncle Arnie is visiting and she glances at the TV like it’s nothin’, like it’s perfectly normal for a kid to do somethin’ that used to make new recruits puke back in the war. To look at a human shape—and the people on the screen looked like they were real as you and me—to look at a human shape and pull that trigger and watch it go down and not even flinch, to not feel that instinctual twinge at causing a death . . .”
Arnie wiped sweat off his brow.
He said, “I served next to some coldhearted bastards in the war, guys who had that stare, you know, kids from the streets, kids who got beat before bed every night growin’ up. And even those guys, those hard characters, they would freeze up the first time they had to pull a trigger with a living thing at the other end.”
I said, “Well, they’re pretty violent but they’re just games—”
“Open your ears, Wong. I’m not tellin’ you these games have been around and I’m such an old geezer that I never noticed them. These games, the devices that play them, they didn’t exist before last month. And now they’re everywhere, on every TV set and, hey, ask around and people say they’ve been common for years and years. I’m a journalist, I travel, I got kids in the family, I know the world. And they didn’t sell these game boxes before, I know they didn’t because it’s insane that they do at all. But I start seeing the shadows move and I get up one day and suddenly every kid is glued to a box that’s training him. Tell me it ain’t. Millions of them, all over the country, all over the world, millions of kids spending hours and hours getting quicker and quicker on the trigger, getting truer and truer aim and colder and colder inside. That’s training. That’s conditioning if I ever saw it. And in your world, in this world, this version of reality that played out, nobody finds this strange? Really?”
“Well . . .”
There was nothing to say. The thought that the bad guys had that kind of power just sank me, left me numb. The bad thing was I couldn’t even write off Arnie as crazy, since he had already wasted most of his day on me and that really wouldn’t be fair.
“And the thing is,” said Arnie, “as time goes on I can feel it fading. Like a dream. I get used to the idea, I think, ‘Yeah, sure, they’ve always been there, these games. It’s me, it’s the stress, it’s age, it’s the drugs I did back in the day comin’ back.’ But then I flip around on the news and I see other little differences, things I know ain’t right. Like the pope. Pope John Paul the second, still out there popin’ and lookin’ one hundred years old. I remember that guy getting shot and killed, way back in the early nineties. He got replaced by a guy named Pope Leo the something. And I squint and I can almost picture that other pope’s face. A black guy. Younger, in his fifties. But no. No, he’s nowhere to be found now and here’s yet another little thing that’s been tweaked. And it’s impossible and it’s so big, the idea of it, that thinkin’ about it makes me feel like a worm stuck in the treads of a tire on an eighteen-wheeler. You know what I’m saying?”
I nodded, slowly. “Yes. Yes, Arnie, I do.”
“So what do we do? If this is really what’s goin’ on, what do we do?”
“I’m going to suggest ‘nothing.’ ”
He turned to me. “Because you’re afraid they’ll take Amy. Look, if we entertain the idea that these things are real and that this thing, this ‘Korrok’ is really tampering with the world, and I assume it’s not for the purpose of making it better, then surely there’s something we can—”
“Oh, there is, Arnie. I know there is. It’s called being willing to sacrifice everyone around me for the cause. And why not? All of the great men do it. The pyramids were built with tens of thousands of nobodies who were worked to death so that the big thing could be achieved. That’s the name of the game, that’s how you defeat the bad guys. Just be willing to spend your friends like pennies, that’s all. You asked me earlier if I was a sociopath. Well, you’d better hope I am because the world was built by sociopaths, men willing to send a million innocent boys into battle to be chopped to screaming giblets, all so a banner can be raised over another piece of land with houses and markets and roads soon after.”
I was talking faster and faster. I bit back my next sentence, made myself calm down. Got to focus. Freaking ADD.
I said, “That psychologist back in school, she gave me the PCL-R, that’s a test where they rate you from zero to forty based on personality traits of sociopaths. Glibness, inflated ego, violence, juvenile delinquency, all that serial killer shit. Anything above a score of thirty gets you a diagnosis of sociopathy. I got a twenty-nine. And the irony is that I had to steal the file from the cabinet to find out that score. Do you think that’s worth the extra point?”
He shook his head slowly. “I’m not following you.”
“Which would prove I’m a monster, Arnie? Sacrificing the people I love for the fight? Or walking away from the fight to save the people I love?”
Arnie didn’t want to get sucked into a debate on that subject and instead said, “Just hear me out. Say we just go public with it, with your story. My story, too.”
“Why, Arnie? What good is that gonna do?”
“You get other people to come forward, other people like us who sense what’s goin’ on. Strength in numbers. Hell, people believe in angels and UFOs and every other thing. They’ll listen. The bad guys can’t make us all disappear, can they? They got to have limits to what they can do. They got to.”
“Why?”
Arnie again threw out his hands, like an NBA player acting baffled by a referee’s call.
“This is all I got, Wong. I have no faith to speak of and no skill but what you see. The truth, the power of knowledge in the hands of the people, all that journalism school song and dance, that’s what I believe in. It’s all I believe in. I got nothin’ else. I got nothin’ else to fight with. But I know this, too. You took my calls for a reason. So that makes me think you had the same idea.”
I said, “It was Amy’s idea. Meeting you.”
Arnie asked, “She’s still in Utah?”
“Who?”
“Amy.”
“Just checking. Yeah, she’s still there with the lesbians. There’s been some incidents since she left. A big monstrous guy came after me and I killed him. Twice. Had to cut off his head. I found a big slug thing in my kitchen. We fought a monster made of meat. They take their shots. I didn’t want Amy to be a part of that, I wanted something better for her. I tried to sort of cut her off, get her to start a new life. Her own life. But she calls me. All the time. Ever since she left, she calls and calls. I wound up with a four-hundred-dollar phone bill one month. I told her about you wantin’ to meet me and she told me I should do it, that she had a feeling.”
“See? She knows. She knows, and you know, that we got to shine light on these cockroaches. The shadows hate the light, let’s shine my light on these bastards. Let people know what’s happening to their world.”
I said, “Just telling our stories, that won’t do shit. Testimony of two nutjobs, that’ll just get us lumped in with the Roswell guys, a minority of nerds pleading a ridiculous case, supported by e-mails from equally crazy and lonely people.”
“Then what do you want to—”
“We show them this.”
I pulled the silver canister from my pocket.
“This is real, Arnie. A physical piece of evidence. That’s what Amy thought, that if you could get this in the hands of somebody, a lab or something. I don’t know. And there’s gotta be more soy sauce out there. We already got two canisters. Or maybe it’ll come back in this bottle, the way it did before. Maybe the bottle manufactures it. But you got to know people, at a university, somebody with an electron microscope. Because I’m thinkin’ that whoever takes the first close look at the soy sauce is gonna have a brown stain down the bottom of his lab coat a second later.” I thought for a moment and said, “Just make sure they keep it cold.”
Arnie nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. Make that the story. Hell, let ’em see the effects themselves, feed the shit to a lab rat and watch the fun begin, see the thing start levitating and speaking French.”
And just like that, I felt an intoxicating rush of hope. I tried to crush it, to push it down, to expose it to reality and kill it off. But I couldn’t. It was a sunrise, a kid’s sight of snowfall on a school morning. Hope. That all this can turn out okay, that somehow a tide this big and black can be turned back. Hope like a wildfire, thoughts of presents under a Christmas tree and a smell of cookies coming from a kitchen and a certain look in a girl’s eyes that lights you up inside. That beautiful border between nightmare and morning when you realize that all of the monsters menacing you have evaporated like smoke, leaving behind only the warm blankets and the pale sunlight of a Saturday dawn.
Amy Sullivan. Her name is Amy Sullivan. Her plane landed in Salt Lake City and she called me just two days ago and we talked for four hours and she had bought a new album and made me listen to the whole thing over the phone. Amy Sullivan. She’s still there. Amy—
I said, “And you’re willing to risk everything? Your life, your family? I mean, best-case scenario, your career as a journalist is gonna be over because from now on this is all you’re gonna be known for. And don’t forget that there may be people, real people, who don’t want this out. The people who ransacked my apartment, the people from the factory or the CIA or NSA or Men in Black, whoever it was—they don’t want this stuff known. Are you ready for all that, Arnie?”
