Or sleeping with a friend might have been easier.
But fear of sleeping alone in the big loft with those uncanny images slumbering on her hard drive was no reason to cross a boundary in her most precious friendship. One that couldn’t be uncrossed. The fact that she sensed a depth of feeling from Raf that she couldn’t reciprocate made her sad. It had been good to laugh in the spray of the shower wand, but if she wanted to be able to keep laughing with Rafael, she would have to be careful not to hurt him. The medication was getting her through for now, but she knew what was coming with the longer nights, and the ice and snow. Days when she would barely be able to function, when she would fluctuate between catatonia and flashes of misplaced rage. Raf didn’t need that, didn’t deserve it.
“And I’m not alone, anyway,” she said to Django, bending down to pet him.
He thumped his tail twice on the wood floor. Soon she realized she had absentmindedly moved from scratching the dog’s fur to scratching her own forearm, picking at an itching scab that she couldn’t recall the origin of. She was always getting banged up on urbex outings, but the scab picking was a nervous habit that Nina had pointed out to her, and she forced herself to stop.
That crown was in a pool of blood and you know it, and seeing it on a big screen will only be worse. Far worse.
She should have told Rafael to stay. She was more rattled than she’d realized because the dog had kept her mind off it until now. And yet she wasn’t finished tending to his needs. She’d been happy to watch her new companion clean his food dish, but now he was due to go out before she could sleep. God only knew what would come out of him, with all of the standing water he’d been drinking. In hindsight, the beef jerky didn’t seem like such a great thing to have given him on an out-of-practice digestive system, but she knew they never would have won him over without it. Not today, anyway. She had done better by him for his first meal at home: kibble soaked in warm water to keep him from bloating. She stretched and cracked her back, trying to let go of the tension, then grabbed a couple of plastic grocery store bags from a cabinet and stuffed them into her coat pocket.
Django didn’t need to see the leash to get up and follow her. He gave up the blanket beside the heater as soon as she started moving. Apparently they had already formed some kind of bond on the basis of one meal and a roof that didn’t leak. He looked both sad and comical with his botched haircut. She’d need a proper electric trimmer to do it right and she wasn’t sure she could spare the expense. There were going to be some significant vet bills in the next few days, with vaccines and maybe even an antibiotic for that ear. She’d asked around and found that even the flat rate for an office visit was steep, but she did have a bit of money now from her grandmother, and groceries were overrated anyway. She wasn’t going to splurge on a groomer, but for now, at least he wasn’t flea ridden and chewing the hell out of himself.
She slipped the collar over his head—black nylon with a red Celtic knot that matched the leash. Then, pausing to grab the headlamp and pull her jacket on, she led him out the door, down the stairs, and into the night.
She could see her breath against the black sky as soon as they stepped out onto the sidewalk, and it reminded her of the nights when she used to step out into the cold to smoke. Django peed on the side of the building before she could even get him near anything resembling a tree. She started to reprimand him but instead said, “You know what? That’s perfectly cool, dude. It’s your territory now, you go ahead and mark it. Rite of passage.”
He looked up at the sound of her voice and seemed to grin while the last few bursts splashed a dark spray across the bricks. It almost frosted on contact.
Looking at the urine-stained side of the warehouse brought to mind the fractal patterns she’d found lurking in seemingly plain surfaces, and she wondered if the same shapes were concealed here. There had been no sign of them in the indoor photos she’d taken earlier, but down here on the shadowy street it wasn’t hard to imagine that there might be traces of whatever had infested the mill, like an encroaching fungus striving steadily toward the second floor. She dismissed the notion with a shiver, gave the leash a little tug, and prompted Django to walk with her around the building. He trotted along willingly, and she took courage from his company when they stepped out of the orange glow of the sodium lights and into the weed-choked horseshoe courtyard.
Django sniffed around, eager to scout new territory even in the bitter cold, and in no apparent hurry to drop a load. Becca followed him, bouncing on her feet to keep warm through each pause.
From the courtyard she could see across Fort Point Channel to Southie. The sight of phone wires swaying in the biting wind made her grateful for the shelter of the building. Django tugged, and, not daring to risk letting go of the leash, she let him pull her around the lot for a while, on the trail of some scent. She gazed at the sky and saw a couple of stars like ice chips through tatters in the gray cloud cover. She cupped her hands around her nose and breathed warm air into them. The heat felt good. It brought feeling back to the tip of her nose, which started to run. She had no tissue and tasted the saline on her upper lip with her tongue. “Okay, buddy,” she said to the dog, “Time’s up. We’re going in. You shit on the floor, so be it.”
But Django’s body had stiffened, and not from the cold. His snout low and ears cocked forward to tune in on some sound, he had dropped into a ready stance, as if preparing to spring. Becca saw that his tail was curled down, the fur raised near the base, and as she bent to stroke it smooth and utter reassurances, she heard a low growling. Within a few seconds it became clear that the rumble wasn’t coming from the dog but from something much larger approaching, and before she could figure out what it was, Django had yanked the leash from her hand and was charging toward the street, barking furiously.
She chased him, stomped on the leash, and put all of her weight on her front foot. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to halt a malnourished mutt. Django strained in his collar and directed a barrage of territorial barks toward the street where the rumble of an engine was growing louder. Becca didn’t take her boot off the leash until she had a firm grip on it, and by then Django was reconsidering his bluster.
The rumble had quickly grown to resemble the din of a small army of dragons—not just one engine cutting the quiet night, but a cavalcade of them buzzing the tarmac. Tail tucked between his hind legs, Django backed against Becca just as the first vehicle came into view. It was an armored tactical truck, like a Humvee but not quite. Becca was no expert on military machines, but she’d seen Humvees on the news and parked around town as gas-guzzling status symbols. This truck was bigger. It sported what looked like a bulletproofed grill emblazoned with a cougar’s head and the word LENCO in white beneath a black hood cut to the angles of a stealth bomber. As the thing rumbled by, she saw some kind of binocular scope mounted on the roof beside a domed hatch. She had glimpsed the shape of a helmeted driver through the windshield, but the only windows on the back and sides were small rectangles of smoked glass.
It was the first of several, and when she looked at the iron bridges that spanned the channel, she saw a black SWAT van led by two police motorcycles with their flashers on racing to catch up with whatever this procession was that had army trucks for a forward guard.
Her hair blew around her face as the cavalcade passed, and she watched them trundle northwest toward the Back Bay. When the rumble had mostly faded she led Django back inside and rode the freight elevator with him up to the loft. The stresses of the day were catching up with her, and now she only wanted to sleep. Hopefully the dog would let her. The idea of making him a fluffy bed of old blankets and towels kindled an unfamiliar maternal feeling in her, and she decided she would set it up beside her own bed.
Entering the building, she’d had it in mind to get on the computer for a brief scan of the local news sites and maybe Twitter, to find out what that police ruckus was all about, but back in the relative warmth of the loft, her head grew heavy, and by
the time she’d made the dog a bed, her curiosity had faded into fatigue. Except, that wasn’t entirely true. What she’d lost was not her curiosity but the resolve to approach the machine where those impossible photos slumbered behind an eighth of an inch of hi-def liquid crystal. Those could wait for the light of day, and so could news of the world beyond her door.
Chapter 11
Jason Brooks had given up on the hope that a dog might change his life back in 2010 when the Wonderland greyhound track was shut down by popular vote. After that he had moved on to horses, but he still missed the dogs. Horses made it look too easy, until one of them wiped out and threw a jockey and reminded you just how much mass and muscle was flying over the dirt; but dogs…dogs looked like they had a personal stake in the game. And a greyhound running like a mad motherfucker was a sight to behold. The track closure didn’t surprise him. Attitudes toward animals were changing in the twenty-first century, and of course the blue bleeding hearts of Massachusetts led the trend. The horses would probably be the next to go, but by then the state would at least have more casinos. For now, he divided his weekends between the First Light Casino on the Wampanoag reservation thirty minutes south of Boston, and the Suffolk Downs track just north of the city.
On the Saturday in September when Brooks’ fortunes shifted, it was a horse that did it, and while he did win some money that morning, he would wonder for a long time after if the wager had put him in the right place at the right time or quite the opposite.
Like all pivotal moments in a life, it came about by a chain of events. If he hadn’t bet on Noon Shadow in the first race of the day, he would have stayed at the track later. If he hadn’t quit after Noon Shadow placed first, he wouldn’t have been on the harbor ferry within an hour, nor would he have been on the T when the bomb went off. Blame it on the horse.
Blame it on Hurricane Sonia for flooding most of the Blue Line in 2017 and adding the ferry trip to his travel time. Whichever it was that put him underground on the right train to witness the massacre, it was part of a chain, and who could say where a chain began? Maybe it had always been his destiny to be on that train; because what were the chances of a SPECTRA agent being present when some psycho finally found a way to tear a hole in the fabric of reality?
So the big break in a career that had meandered from cop to detective to agent in a supralegal clandestine Intel agency turned on his gambling habit. Go figure. Two paydays in one. But every lucky break comes with a cost. The gambling habit had already cost him his wife, and the cost of witnessing the attack could take years to count—he knew that while he was still in the thick of it. It sure didn’t feel lucky at the time, but some people survived because he was on that train, so maybe they were lucky. Maybe.
A week prior, he had won and then lost big on the roulette wheel at First Light when red 23 kept coming up longer than it should have. Today, he had balanced the scales at the horse track and quit while he was ahead by reminding himself of a quote he’d seen online, and running it around his mind like a mantra (or a thoroughbred) as he walked to the payout window: the safest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it back in your pocket.
He caught the ferry at Wood Island station where the rest of the Blue Line was now growing barnacles under water, and connected to the Outbound Red Line at Kendall. The plan was to stop by the SPECTRA office at Harvard and log a couple hours on the secure network to make up for time lost on Friday when his lunch hour had turned into a bit of a Keno binge. He’d felt guilty about it all morning, and knew he wouldn’t be able to really enjoy celebrating the win tonight if he didn’t make right at work first. If he balanced the scales, he wouldn’t have to worry about how impossible it would be to go in on Sunday with a hangover. But he never did make it to the office, or to the bar after. The kid with the boom box got on at Central.
* * *
Darius Marlowe hadn’t deliberated much over his target. Inbound or Outbound? Park Street Station had crossed his mind, of course. The Boston Common could be considered the center of the city, but that made it harder to get out. Harvard Square, on the other hand, was a prestigious locale with more exit options. If he could jack a car at Harvard he’d have a better chance of getting out than if he were hemmed in by the urban labyrinth of the city proper. And striking so close to the ivory tower, beacon of all that was rational in the Western world, well, that certainly scored some points for a man who wanted to rattle nerves. These calculations flitted through his head, and he made his choice almost on impulse.
He sat on the station bench in a multicolored tile alcove with the CENTRAL sign above his head, the boom box at his feet. The dark domed eyes of cameras on poles suspended from the ceiling seemed to glare at the platform with omnidirectional scrutiny. He did his best to avoid staring back, but found his gaze darting toward them anyway, and each time it did he forced it to keep moving, turning his head to rest his eyes on something else. The game reminded him of checking out a hot girl without getting caught. But there were no hot girls waiting for the train, just a white guy about his own age in a Celtics jersey with a ponytail and a lot of leather jewelry. Darius looked past him at a black door beside what looked like a pair of fire hose spigots with red wheels in a recessed aluminum panel surrounded by more of the multicolored tile. There was a metal box with an emergency button, and a keypad backlit with red numbers. A red sign on the adjacent door proclaimed:
This Door Is Controlled &
Monitored By:
MBTA SECURITY
Use Employee I.D. To
Gain Access.
Darius’s eyes swept across the dome cameras again. He’d boarded the T at this stop before but had never noticed all these security details. Had he unwittingly chosen a station that housed a higher security presence than most? Charobim had been so intent on instructing him in the science of his mission that they hadn’t discussed reconnaissance or even target selection, and Darius had been given no particular orders regarding how to deal with security personnel if they approached him. He recalled an article he’d found on a local news blog while researching. A few years old, it had been written when the MBTA went digital and started tweeting delays and changes of service. The article was pretty inane, but the accompanying photo had raised his hairs, and he recalled it now in vivid detail: a group of men in white shirts and ties sitting at a command console in a dark room, around the perimeter of which ran a curved ribbon of monitors all lit up green with track maps and night vision video feeds of the tunnels. Was he being recorded right now, or only observed? Would they play the feed later to identify the man with the boom box, and if so, was his face in any facial recognition databases already? There was no way of knowing. He was wearing sunglasses, but that wouldn’t help much. But he had a minimal online presence, and that just might slow them down.
He felt perspiration in his armpits, even though he’d put on antiperspirant in the morning out of habit. The station smelled of hot brake pads but he knew he wasn’t sweating from the heat. He shifted on the bench and turned his back to the cameras, resisting the urge to touch the boom box, pick it up, and angle it away from the digital eyes as well.
A couple more people had gathered, milling around near the wide yellow line: a short Muslim woman in a headscarf dotted with zirconium chips, poking at a smartphone in a bright purple case; and a hipster in thick-rimmed glasses and an army cap, a backpack slung over one shoulder. The hipster looked as fidgety as Darius felt, and somehow watching him as he leaned over the yellow line and searched the depths of the tunnel for the light of a train calmed Darius. You’re going to die in the next ten minutes and you have no idea. You’re anxious to get somewhere on time, but you will never arrive, and I know this, and you don’t. If knowledge was power, then the knowledge of the assassin, the executioner, the slaughter man, was very empowering indeed.
Darius took a deep breath at the sound of the approaching train as it rumbled in and glided to a hissing stop.
He stepped aboard and took inventory of
his victims. The car was bustling but not full, and he found a seat at the back. He’d chosen one of the rear cars, farthest from the driver. Even with aviator shades on, he noted the details of the car with heightened intensity, and although he intended to survive the dimensional breach, he couldn’t help thinking that this must be how a condemned man sees when he steps into the execution chamber. Everything seemed to glow and buzz under the fluorescent lights: the cardboard banner ads over the dark windows, the rainbow patterned upholstery of the seats, even the marbleized rubber floor.
“Nyarlathotep protect me that I may serve well the Great Old Ones,” he whispered under the rattle and screech of the accelerating train.
The seats to either side of him were vacant. Directly across the aisle sat a black lady with a leopard-print purse beside a fat white man in khakis and a blue blazer with a white baseball cap. They didn’t seem to be together, and neither made eye contact with him. Farther up the train, a Latina in a gray sweater and black skirt was talking loudly into her cell phone about some surgery she’d had recently and how the doctors weren’t as good as the ones at Beth Israel. Her nasal voice cut through the mechanical din. There were seats, but she was standing by choice, holding one of the rubber handles. A few seconds of her monologue gave Darius the impression that she was probably afraid to plant her ass on a public cushion. He wondered if she’d sanitized the hand loop with Purell, like some people did with shopping-cart handles. Beyond the loud, obnoxious lady, he could see random swatches of attire shifting around when the car took corners. A pink Red Sox jersey on a young girl with flaxen hair and shallow brown eyes that he couldn’t stand to look at; Adidas sneakers on what looked like a grad student with a heavy laptop bag; a plaid shirt on an Asian guy reading a Kindle and wearing black earbuds.
Red Equinox Page 9
