by David Wong
“You think that’s why we’re here? To carry out a witch hunt?”
“I think you’re here for the same reason as the witch hunters. To lay blame for something you can’t understand.”
“So if you ran into what others called a monster, you would show it mercy? Protect it? Become its friend?”
“Yep, probably.”
“Even if it put the world in danger? This is not a hypothetical. I need you to understand what I’m saying. There are entities out there who will use your pity to their advantage. Look around you.”
Amy sighed and surveyed the rows of afflicted moaning around her. “Yes, Agent Wyatt, clearly the problem with the world is that we humans are just too darned merciful. Are you going to ask me questions about the actual case?”
“I already have. Step back through the door, please.”
John
“Hello,” purred the woman in the form-fitting suit and skirt, sauntering toward John along with a tanned Latino man with a beard and designer sunglasses. “My name is Agent Josaline Pussnado, my partner is Agent Sax Cocksman. To prevent you from coordinating, we are going to interview you separately, and simultaneously.”
She stared into John’s eyes and said, “You first. But I’m telling you now, if you so much as raise a threatening eyebrow in my direction, I’ll replace it with a bullet hole the size of a golf ball. Am I understood?”
John said, “You might not find me so easy to kill. But I’ve got questions of my own, so let’s get this shit over with.”
John stepped through, saw the arena full of diseased humanity, and lit a cigarette. The place smelled like a stew made from cabbage and zombie scrotums.
“So in this dimension, this is their national sport? They line up all the sick people and fans buy tickets to come see which one dies first? Disgusting.”
“Shut up,” said Agent Pussnado. “Hold still.”
She ran a wand up and down John’s body, as if searching for hidden weapons. When it passed over his crotch, it let out a threatening buzz.
John said, “Your machine is broken. There’s no metal in there. Not yet.”
“It doesn’t detect metal,” she said, glancing at his groin. “It detects danger. Now, we know your friend is behind the disappearances of those kids. The only reason we haven’t shackled him and thrown him into a deep, dark place is that we’re also sure he’s but one piece of the puzzle. Either he’s working in conjunction with something, or on its behalf.”
“And also, you’re not sure if he can be shackled.”
She didn’t respond, but John knew it was true. John said, “You think what you think purely because They want you to think it. You’re dancing right along to their tune, like those dancing cats they have in Japan.”
“I’ve literally never heard of—”
“All these signs point to Dave only because the thing behind this wants you to go after him. Amy, too, all that stuff about the security cameras—they want us out of the picture, and are using you as a tool.”
The man on the cot nearby whispered something. John leaned close enough to hear the man say, “… kill … me…”
The woman said, “Your loyalty to your friends is admirable. But the day is coming when you are going to have to make a terrible decision. Will you?”
The man on the cot started screaming. Something was writhing in his abdomen, thrashing under the skin, trying to tear its way out. There was a ripping sound, and out from the man’s belly came a hideous creature, some horrific parasite having hatched inside him. It had teeth where its eyes should be and where its teeth should be, more teeth.
John looked around for a weapon and found a nearby flamethrower. He picked it up and unleashed a torrent of fire that consumed parasite and host alike, the man screaming out his gratitude for having been put out of his misery. Soon, other parasites were hatching all around them, one disease-ridden victim after another giving birth to their unholy offspring. John spun the flame thrower in an arc, setting everything in the vicinity ablaze.
The fuel quickly ran out. John tossed the flamethrower aside and picked up Agent Pussnado from where she was cowering on the turf.
“Will I do what has to be done?” he asked, sneering at her. “What do you think? Now let’s get the hell out of here. I’m thinking the Patriots aren’t making the playoffs this year.”
John spotted where the portal had opened at the end of the row. He yanked the woman off her feet and hauled her toward the doorway, a horde of the skittering dog-sized parasites in pursuit. John tossed the agent through the open portal and spun to face the onslaught. He snatched his switchblade from its ankle scabbard and stabbed a thrashing parasite as it launched itself at his face. John’s entire shirt was ripped from his body.
“Just come through and close the door!” screamed Pussnado, from the other side of the portal. “You can’t kill them all! It doesn’t matter!”
John slashed another of the parasites, then another. He glared at the woman over his shoulder and said, “It all matters.”
Me
I found myself back in the parking lot, standing next to John and Amy, facing the two agents and unsure if anything had actually happened. It didn’t feel like we’d moved. The dozen cloaked figures who encircled us each had their strange weapons at the ready. I wondered if we ducked at the right moment if they would all just shoot each other.
John looked around as if confused and said, “Did we, uh, pass?”
The female agent I knew as Tasker said, “If we allow you to leave this place, what will you do?”
I said, “Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Amy will go to work, I’ll go home and masturbate, John will go to his place, feed his dog, and also masturbate probably. You’ll never hear from us again.”
“You are a practiced, yet unskilled, liar. I know that you will continue to pursue a resolution in this case. We cannot allow you to do that.”
“But you already said you don’t have permission to kill us.”
The male agent, Gibson, said, “It’s believed by our superiors that you are surrounded by a blowback sphere.”
I said, “The last three syllables of that sentence were nonsense to me.”
“They think any attempt to kill you will automatically recoil on us and our organization via some unnatural means. I say it’s bullshit, but it’s above our pay grade.”
Actually, I thought, the people who are nice to us also meet with horrific misfortune. I think it’s a proximity thing.
John said, “What, like we’re protected somehow? Like we’ve got a guardian angel, or a force field?”
Tasker said, “I assure you, the forces shielding you are in no way angelic. If you are protected, it is only so that you can carry out Their will. Strings are pulled to clear the path wherever you go, surely you’ve sensed that.”
I said, “Holy shit, I’d hate to see what my life would look like if I wasn’t getting help.”
“Exactly,” said Tasker. “But, while you cannot be harmed, there are alternatives available to us.” She nodded at one of the cloaks. “Do you know what their weapons do?”
I said, “No, but I’ve always been curious to find out.”
“On their current setting, they simply change your mind. I don’t mean they convince you, I mean they change your mind completely. Forge new, somewhat random connections in your brain. They leave you perfectly healthy, but also completely unaware of who you are, how you got here, or what you’re fighting for. You won’t know your name, you won’t recognize each other. You will be wiped clean, then each transported to separate locations with new identities. You will start your lives over as new people. You will no longer have any urge to interfere with the situation here, but will be otherwise physically and psychologically healthy, and thus should not trigger this supposed dark sphere of protection that surrounds you. The best of both worlds.”
Amy said, “You can’t do that.”
Gibson said, “Hey, babe, it’s better than a bullet.”
Tasker said, “We can’t do that, for obvious reasons. The goal isn’t to have you spend six months reverse engineering your lives to wind up right back here. The goal is for you to start anew, and never feel the compulsion. Don’t worry, you won’t miss David. You’ll never know he was ever in your life. There’ll be nothing to miss. It’s like when they do surgery on an infant—they don’t bother with anesthesia before they slice into its chest, as they know it will not remember the pain.”
Amy turned to me and said, “I’ll find you. Somehow.”
Tasker said, “No, you will not.”
John said, “This plan is idiotic. Supernatural shit is still going to show up at each of our doorsteps, and when it does we’re going to get on the Internet and research it and you know what we’re going to find? Stories about us. The past will all come rushing back.”
“Those Internet searches will turn up nothing. Where you’re going, those articles do not exist, because those events won’t have happened.”
“Oh,” I said. “When you said we would be relocated, you didn’t mean we’d be dumped off in Arkansas. You meant we’re each going through the door.”
“One at a time. Each to a different world.”
John lit a cigarette and said, “No. You’ll have to kill us.”
“No, I won’t. It’ll be just like waking up from a deep sleep, you won’t feel any desire for revenge or even a faint sadness about what you lost. You will be curious about your amnesia, of course, but when you go searching for your old identity, there will be nothing to discover.”
Amy’s arms were around me.
She said, “David, they can’t do this. They can’t.”
She’ll be happier.
John, now showing genuine alarm, said, “So, you take us out of the picture and the thing in the mine smashes its way out and starts impaling all of humanity on its million barbed penises. What then? Your people have to desperately track us down and beg for our help? Reprogram our brains back the way they were?”
Gibson said, “Getting you out of the picture is our only hope for keeping the entity in the mine contained, asshole.”
I said, “Yeah, I can actually see that.”
Tasker looked at John and said, “You’re considering running, maybe trying to take me hostage. Just remember—we choose where that door goes. You make this hard for us, and you’ll wake up in a world where the sky is black and worms crawl out of your rationed meat. Go easy, and I’ll send you someplace that’s pretty much like this.”
John said, “Do you have one where Tupac is still alive?”
Amy said, “Give us a moment to say good-bye.”
And time to think, I thought.
Tasker said, “Again, what’s the point of a good-bye that won’t be remembered?”
Amy said, “What’s the point of all this explanation, if it won’t be remembered? Why didn’t you just shoot us with your brain rays right off the bat?”
“Isn’t it obvious? This alleged invisible hand that protects you, I wanted to know that it wouldn’t reach out to stop us at the moment of decision. It didn’t. Now, I have a busy night ahead, so…”
Tasker nodded to the nearest cloak—his sagging face had a gray rubber mustache—and he pointed a thing at me that looked like a robotic elephant’s detachable dick.
I recoiled. Amy threw herself in front of me and John said, “WAIT!”
There was a pop, sounding like a gunshot echoing in the distance. I didn’t feel any different. Then the cloak with the elephant dick gun slumped to his knees, black blood running freely from what was supposed to be his forehead. As he went down, he fired his weapon wildly, an impossibly bright blue light blasting forth and hitting Agent Gibson right in his face.
Gibson got this weird look in his eyes. He blinked and took in what surrounded him, seeing first the three of us, who looked harmless enough, and then the circle of ominous black cloaks with their alien arsenal. One of them stepped forward and raised its weapon at us, looking to finish the project begun by his colleague.
Gibson’s eyes went wide and instinct took over. He pulled a gun from a shoulder holster and in one reflexive motion put the cloaked thing down with a headshot.
Tasker screamed, “DROP IT!” and drew her own weapon on her rogue partner. But Agent Gibson, frantic over his inability to remember who the hell he was, had shifted into fight-or-flight mode. He spun, saw the gun pointed at him, and shot his fellow agent in the chest.
Eyeballs swollen with panic, he turned and ran, firing in front of him to clear a path through the cloaks. John, Amy, and I followed. I was about to yell for somebody to steal one of the NON trucks, but the moment we ran off the parking lot and hit the road, Gibson turned and saw the three of us in tow. Interpreting this as pursuit, he raised the gun toward me and pulled the trigger—
The man was blasted out of view by a Range Rover. It skidded to a stop in front of us, Chastity Payton at the wheel.
“Y’ALL GET THE FUCK IN HERE!”
We crammed ourselves into the back seat and she sped off into the night. There was a hunting rifle with a scope propped up on the front seat next to her.
Chastity craned her head around and said, “They following us?”
I said, “I don’t see headlights, but I don’t think they use them. You killed both of those dudes?”
“May they find peace in the next world, but their own choices took ’em there. If your people dress like that, you’re on the wrong side.”
Amy said, “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. The four of us, we’re gonna have a talk. And I’ll tell you right now, I’m just about sick of this shit.”
John said, “They’re coming!”
There was a black truck behind us, no headlights, coming fast. Chastity hunched forward and stepped on the gas. She had a determined look in her eyes that kind of scared me—a “They’ll never take me alive” look.
We soon found our lane obstructed by a slow semi, barely managing the speed limit. Chastity swung to the left to pass and immediately was almost obliterated by an oncoming car that honked angrily as it flew by. The NON vehicle was growing in the rearview mirror.
We reached an overpass, and Chastity swung out to the left lane and once again found oncoming headlights—another semi. This time she didn’t go back, she floored it, attempting to thread the needle. Everyone screamed.
She cleared the truck on the right and yanked the wheel over a split second before the honking juggernaut went whooshing past. I swore I heard it scrape paint off the side mirror.
The NON truck behind us had tried to follow.
It smashed directly into the eighteen-wheeler we’d just avoided.
Through the rear window I saw chaos, the truck’s trailer jackknifing and rolling across the overpass, cargo spraying down onto the roadway below.
John said, “Jesus.”
“You see,” said Chastity, “that’s why you want the Range Rover. Jeep would have tipped over doing that shit. Always got to be prepared, that’s what I say.”
12. DIOGEE WASN’T A GOOD DOG
Chastity took a winding, random path back toward town, but we never saw any additional pursuit. I half-expected NON to roust a helicopter to track us beyond the blocked roadway, but we apparently didn’t rate that kind of response, not yet.
We pulled over at a truck stop, parking in a spot where a row of trailers would hide us from the road. Chastity shifted into park, pulled out a revolver, and turned around in her seat so she could point it right at my face. I had lost count of how many guns had been pointed at me in the last hour. Was it five?
She said, “Tell me exactly what is going on here. Don’t bullshit me, don’t sugarcoat it. Tell me the whole truth. Right now. Because I’m tellin’ you, I am on my last nerve here.”
I said, “Are you going to believe me, if I do? Otherwi
se we’re just wasting each other’s time.”
“I like to think I know the truth when I hear it.”
“Good. I had never seen your son before they found him in my apartment.”
“I believe you.”
“You do? Well, that’s good, then. Someone stuck him in there, to frame us.”
“No, that ain’t right, neither.”
“Okay. Well, why don’t you tell me what—”
“There’s somethin’ wrong with him. With Mikey. He isn’t right. None of this is right.”
John said, “On that, we agree.”
Amy asked, “Is he talking? Your son?”
“Oh, he talks.”
“What does he say happened, that night? Does he remember?”
“Says your man here woke him up, standing in his bedroom. Says David snapped his fingers and suddenly they were someplace else, some kind of fucked-up Disneyland.”
I said, “Joy Park?”
“How’d you know?”
“It came up in the Maggie Knoll case. It’s not a real park.”
“No shit it’s not a real park. Mikey says when you walk in the front gate, everybody gets a pair of wings, lets everybody fly around from ride to ride. Try to look up Joy Park on the web, all you find are the biggest titties I’ve ever seen on an Asian girl. Then said you told him the last ‘ride’ would involve him living in the belly of a monster.”
I said, “So, what do you want from us? And before you ask me to tell you what’s going on, I’ll just stop you there, because we don’t have any fucking idea.”
“I want you to see him. My boy. To talk to him. I need someone else to understand, because I feel like my mind is splitting in half.”
I said, “Fine, let us talk to him.”
“Mikey won’t talk to you. He thinks you’re the one who snatched him.”
Amy said, “What about me? He doesn’t have any reason to be scared of me, does he? What is it you want us to find out?”
“I want you to find out if he’s still my son.”
I thought, Oh.
John said, “You think he’s been … replaced? By a lookalike?”
She said, “The fact that you jumped right to that conclusion tells me you already know this is a possibility. Talk to him. You’ll see.”
