by Tim Scott
“In this business, you have to be quick. If you get to a patient fast, you can cut down long-term discomfort.”
“Call for you, sir,” said another cop.
“I’ve a lumbar problem.”
“She said you’d want to speak to her. It’s about a fridge.”
“A fridge?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Give that to me.” He took the phone. “Who is this?”
chapter
SIXTY-SEVEN
The corner of Seneca and Twelfth was among a jumble of backstreets. Hardly a drongle came by, and the tenement blocks had seen their fair share of tenants live out a slice of their lives among the increasingly crumbling walls. Some of the lucky ones had moved on to better things, but the majority had probably dissolved back into chaotic and vapid lives full of squalor.
Maddox waited, fidgeting on the corner.
“He’s there,” said Nena, squinting through a crack in the door from inside a tube of the Prisoner Rapid Removal system. “Take a look.”
I moved closer, put my eye to the slit, and saw Maddox standing like a lost child in the rain. He’d turned up his collar and had his hands thrust into his pockets. I wondered what sort of a man he was and what kind of a life he went home to at night. Whether there were pictures on the walls, and ornaments on the shelves, or unwashed shirts strewn across the sofa. I stepped back from the slit as the sound of a woman’s feet faded, echoing through the tube.
“Any backup?” I said.
“Can’t see any.” A drongle came juddering up the road. The noise vibrated through the metal, shaking the dingy sides. Then the engine faded away and the silence lengthened.
“Here comes the Frost Fox.”
I could just see the fridge waddle up to him, and then stop.
Maddox looked around. There was a pause and then the fridge opened its door.
Inside, we had thrown enough red smoke canisters to create a cloud the size of Milwaukee, and a dense, red fog blew out.
I heard Maddox coughing as he stumbled back.
Nena tumbled out of the door, and I followed running blindly toward Maddox. The corner of the block was thick, with a balling cloud of red smoke now. When we got within a couple of feet, I saw his hunched gray outline and heard him coughing. Before he could straighten, Nena knocked him out cold and he went down like a dead rhino. We dragged him into the PRR tube and forced the door shut.
I was breathing hard and the noise echoed around in the darkness.
We each grabbed a foot and hauled him through the tube, our footsteps reverberating as Maddox’s large overweight body slid over the shiny metal. He had clearly been at the doughnuts. We came to a junction and took a left, and then a little farther on a right, until we had made a couple of blocks. The track above our head began to move with a gritty growl, and a dribble of watery oil ran along the floor.
We found the door.
I took out the box with the head from a bag on my back and in the darkness I scrabbled to find the point and then finally plugged in. The door swung open with a cough of hydraulics, letting in the light.
It was a street with a pool hall and a run-down mall.
We dragged Maddox down to a head hack booth, then twisting his body around we plugged him in. I held his head steady as Nena fed in the quarters.
In three minutes, we had a pile of photos. The quality from the street booths was pretty poor, but we were hoping this would be all we’d need.
I grabbed the images and we left Maddox there, collapsed on the street. He might be tagged, in which case the rest of the cops would be onto him in minutes. Either way, we didn’t want him getting any kind of memory of us.
“Hey,” said the spin dryer as we came into the cop drongle store. “Did it work out?”
“Are we heading down to Mexico now?” said the Ice Jumper.
“Yeah, it worked out really well. Any sign of the Frost Fox?”
“No, he’s not back yet,” said the spin dryer, but at that moment the fridge came bumbling through the door.
“Okay?” I said.
“I’ve never had smoke before. It was kind of tickly. Reminded me most of a Waldorf salad. Had that kind of nutty aroma,” it said.
I laid out the pictures from the Maddox head hack on the floor. There were about thirty. Some hadn’t printed well, but mostly the images were recognizable. There were a load of other cops, and a few of a block of apartments. We both kneeled down and pored over them.
Nena’s hair brushed my face and the sensation sent a frisson through me.
“Look,” I said eventually. “He’s met this man twice in the last day. You see? Here, and here. That’s him. Each time it was downtown. You see? Carl Anderson Park in this one, and that’s the Blue Lagoon café on East Olive Street. That’s the area where we should look.”
“We find him, we find out who’s behind this,” said Nena.
“Yeah, and my guess is, we’ll also find a lot of trouble.”
chapter
SIXTY-EIGHT
Twilight, and clear.
The ravens circled overhead, and the sidewalks began to swell with the first signs of people heading toward the fireworks that were to celebrate the opening of the new city wall. I looked at them as they walked past, wrapped in coats and scarves, no doubt ready to shout and cheer. They were no different from the mobs that had turned up centuries before to watch a public execution, but it wasn’t a person they were hanging tonight; it was the freedom of a city.
Finally, we hailed a drongle. As we sat down I saw it had a huge crack running through the dome.
I had heard stories of kids hijacking these things, messing about with them, and then putting them back on the highway so that they fell apart. There was even an urban myth about a hacked drongle that took two New York businessmen to Mexico when they only wanted to go a couple of blocks.
Or maybe it was a tale made up as part of some advertising campaign that now escaped me. The crack on this one grated alarmingly so that blue liquid seeped from one of the panels.
“What do you think has happened to Gabe?” I said.
“They’ll head hack him and wipe his mind of the last day.”
“But why isn’t he out by now?”
“He’ll be okay.”
“I turn up after eight years with a load of fridges, wreck his apartment, and get him caught up at Head Hack Central. I haven’t even tried to get him out.”
“He’ll be okay, Huck.”
“What if they go back more than twenty-four hours in his hack?”
“You have no idea where he is, Huck. You could make things worse for him if you do something crazy. And he can’t just run from the city. He lives here. He’ll be okay.”
I stared out feeling powerless.
We passed some graffiti mocking Quantity Surveyors. I remembered reading that they had become universally unpopular after it became public they had miscalculated how many practicing members they had.
Nearby, an outlet for the Quantum Physics Pizza Delivery Company was advertising for business, its facade a melee of neon squiggles. It was a chain that had done well. They operated by knowing either what your order was or where you lived, but as a matter of policy they made sure they never knew both at the same time. It was based on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and made no business sense at all, because either they delivered the right pizza to some wrong random address, or they turned up with a random pizza at the right address. But somehow, they’d made a success of the concept. I guess it was fashionable. And people thought it was amusing. And there was something about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that had caught the mood of the population.
Downtown New Seattle was alive with more people than it knew what to do with.
Nowhere else in the country had I seen people wearing such bizarre hats and frankly dangerous shoulder padding. There was such a wild display of fashion, an anthropologist would have struggled to classify these people as a single species.
For a short time, fashion had come under a governmental department, and had been controlled by a committee in Washington, but the whole thing had fallen apart a few years before, after D.C. had decreed that furry boots were to be trendy the following year. It resulted in sporadic riots, and the government had scrapped the scheme.
The drongle dumped us in an area that had been poured thick with concrete and then mobbed with weird steel and glass shapes that architects habitually passed off as buildings. We were two blocks from the Blue Lagoon café.
When we reached it we found a small place with peeling wallpaper and a steaming coffee machine that monopolized the atmosphere with a wild stream of noises until a waitress dropped a pile of plates and they smashed with a clatter. A wave of embarrassed silence spooled around the café.
We ordered a coffee and asked a few questions, showing the photo of the man in black around. But no one knew anything or they weren’t saying.
I felt tired.
Afterward we wandered around Carl Anderson Park, but there was nothing to find. The place was a detritus of faded glory, and as the last rays of sunlight reached out through a gap in the buildings, I could feel the city steel itself to survive another night.
I sat down by the fountain.
“Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore,” I said, reading an inscription on a plaque, “thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people.”
“These rocks don’t look like they thrill anymore,” said Nena.
“No, I don’t think Chief Seattle had foreseen the onset of commercial office development at the expense of inner-city recreational areas. But you can’t blame him for that.”
She sat down next to me and I sensed the chase had come to a cold and unsatisfying end, but at least we were alive.
“They say you can wipe the memories, but not the feeling behind them.”
“Is that right?”
She pulled out the head hack photos from Maddox and went through them.
“You want to go to a party tonight? I have two tickets.”
“Are you asking me on a date?”
“I might be.”
“Right. Well, I don’t have anything to wear, but thanks for the offer.”
I sat looking at the park, watching the shadows eat away at the paths and neglected flower beds. Eventually a raven landed and eyed us cautiously, perhaps hoping for the remnants of a snack.
“You know what the collective noun for ravens is?” I said. “No.”
“It’s a conspiracy.”
She shuffled another photo to the top of her pile. “A conspiracy of ravens?”
The raven took off untidily with a squawk and I watched it circle, then it landed far above, roosting with many more. “Yeah. There never used to be all these ravens,” I added.
“No?” She put down the photos.
“No. You see them up there?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve seen too many ravens in this city, and now it’s bothering me.”
chapter
SIXTY-NINE
The building was the only old one I had seen in the district.
“We’re chasing ravens?” said Nena, her head tilted to one side.
“There’s something wrong about them.”
“They’re just birds, aren’t they?”
“I don’t think so. Not this time.”
The lock clicked, and the door swung open tentatively. Crowds streamed past on the sidewalk at the bottom of the steps, oblivious.
Nena and I edged into a dark porch, and found ourselves confronted with a tall, cool lobby flanked with columns and arches that led off into dingy corridors. The faintest sounds rose up above us and filled the vast ceiling with a booming echo. I pushed the door and it recoiled in a massive sigh. And then shut.
It triggered a cool feeling at the back of my neck. Maybe the place was deserted. Maybe there was nothing to find. But a small tight knot in my stomach told me otherwise. My mind tried to pass off what I was feeling as a mixture of boredom and excitement, but it wasn’t.
It was fear.
Silence folded over everything again.
The place seemed dislocated from reality.
We walked through to the lobby, scuffling over the marble floor. It was dingy as hell. Soft light fell through another huge opaque window, bathing the space in a gentle musty white shimmer. Particles of dust hung motionless in the air, as though time had slowed so much it would be months before they settled.
Somewhere way above, I heard the screech of a raven, and it reverberated down the wide stairwell.
“Hello?” I said, feeling the echo take my words and throw them about excitedly. Silence returned in heavy waves, cocooning us in a thick pall. Every movement seemed like an event.
We climbed the wide flights of stone steps and came to a small landing. A pile of papers was strewn on the floor, covered in spidery brown longhand.
Another flight, and then another—all bathed in the same diffuse dingy light that came from vast opaque glass windows high up in the walls. It was as though the place had been designed to keep out all signs of the outside world. There was a cool, tingling edge to the silence.
On the next landing an old man was asleep on a bench. He looked familiar, and I realized I had seen him in Head Hack Central. I stared for a moment as his chest rose and fell with each breath.
We reached the next floor. One of the doors was propped open, partly revealing a stretch of carpet that was little more than a nebula of heavily vacuumed stains.
Nena pushed through and I followed. A Raoul Dufy print hung askew in its frame on the far wall. And at the windows we could see the silhouettes of the ravens, casting huge shadows across the room.
On the far side was another massive door.
I caught myself.
It was the one from my dream.
chapter
SEVENTY
I forced it open.
It creaked, then grated tiredly over the floorboards in a surprised “what the hell?” kind of a way. A recoil of dust billowed around and we walked through. It clicked shut behind us with a soft thud. On the other side was a set of stairs exactly like the ones we had come up.
“I dreamed of this,” I said.
“What?”
“This door and this staircase. Come on.”
We walked down, hearing our steps echo off the treads. At the bottom was a door exactly like the one we had come in through. It led onto the street at the back of the building.
It was quiet.
We walked out at the back of the building, and then around to the main street. It was absolutely quiet. There were no drongles, no crowds.
Nothing.
There was absolutely no one anywhere. I touched the nearest building. It was solid. It was real.
Far away, a blue cloud slid in from the east as the sun set. I stared. The thing was really blue. And there were other colored clouds as well in the distance, some a vibrant red, others a brilliant green. And a few a shocking purple.
“Hello?” called Nena. But there was nothing. No birds, no people. “Where the hell are we?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we’re dead.”
We walked, and I began to feel like we were in some gigantic game that someone had constructed, and that in a moment the picture would fade and be replaced by some kind of advert. Then I would wake up to find I was wearing a game helmet and the high scores would scroll across the bottom.
We were in New Seattle, but everyone had gone.
The sky shone and the eerie clacking of our feet echoed away into the silence. The intensity of the strangeness grew until it felt like the air was so thick it was almost solid.
And my body had stopped feeling like it was my own.
“A person,” said Nena. And two blocks down we saw a figure. Nena took off and I tried to keep up with her, but my calves were too tight.
&nbs
p; I stopped, breathing hard, and watched her chase off after the figure.
I felt like I was partly in shock. I walked to the corner of the block, and found Nena standing alone in the street.
“He went down there,” she said.
We pushed open the door and went in.
It was empty.
Ahead was a counter. Above it was displayed a wide range of available pizzas.
“Anyone home?” shouted Nena.
“This is a strange place,” I said. “They have a Fiorentina, but it comes without the egg.”
“And that’s all you find strange?”
A man appeared dressed in a black suit and wearing sunglasses behind the counter. “Who are you?” I said. “What is this place?” And part of me wanted to add, “and how come you have Fiorentina, but it comes without the egg?”
“Welcome to the Otherside,” he said.
“What Otherside? Are we dead?”
“We have a table specially reserved for you upstairs.”
“We didn’t come for pizza,” said Nena. “What has happened to us?”
“Please, your table is upstairs.”
The man pointed, and after a long moment Nena nodded. We went up two flights of stairs, and my heart was beating wildly now.
Had we died? Had someone been waiting for us in that building and the memory of the moment of death had been taken from us? But would this be where we would end up after death? In a pizza place?
The room upstairs was busy, and that was comforting, even if everyone wore black suits. And they were all eating pizza.
Reflexively, I found myself looking for Abigail.
We were shown to a large table by the window that had been set for three.
“Any idea what is going on?” said Nena.
“Maybe we’re dead. Or this is a dream. Perhaps we were taken out, and someone is inserting this in our memory.”
“If we’re dead, then we’ve been lied to by a whole range of theologians over thousands of years. I can’t think of a single religion that mentioned pizza.”
A man in black wearing sunglasses sat down with us.
“Why have you come?” he said. “Other than for the pizza?”
