by Sean Platt
He swallowed, still staring at himself. A long time had passed since he saw beyond his appearance in the mirror and was forced to contemplate the man beneath the skin — the father who’d lost so much, if not everything. He closed his eyes to keep self-pity from taking root in his mind.
“Do you have kids?” he asked his invisible captors.
“I’ve gotta tell you, they can be a real pain in the ass sometimes. My wife and I weren’t planning on having any. Well, I wasn’t. And she said she wasn’t, but who knows what goes on in the deepest parts of a woman’s mind? They’re hardwired to want kids. So, even when they say they don’t, there’s still some biological part deep inside that says, ‘Oh yeah you do.’ Maybe men are hardwired, too; I don’t know. I didn’t think I wanted a kid, but when Jade came into our lives, I changed my mind.”
Eyes still closed, Ed continued.
“Funny thing about kids, you have this idea about who you are. What you want in life. What you want to do, be, and all that hubris. Your plans can be cast in concrete, and you can carry an unshakable belief that you were meant to do one thing and one thing only. But the minute your child looks at you in that way, wide-eyed and full of trust and love and all the things you feel you don’t deserve ... the minute they look at you like that, you question everything. You begin to think you were meant for something better. To be someone your child can look up to. To make a difference in their world. Some people go their whole lives and never get that message, that call to be something greater than themselves. They never experience that moment. But I did.”
He opened his eyes, looking at the mirror again.
“And I went against it. I chose the agency over what my heart was telling me. I did what you wanted me to do. I ignored that call to be a better person, father, and husband. I kept following your instructions because you all said the world would be better, safer, blah-blah-blah. Take a look outside. Tell me, for all the shit we’ve done, all the lives we’ve taken, all we’ve sacrificed, did it make us any safer? Is the world any better off? Could we prevent whatever the hell happened?”
Ed swallowed hard, glanced at the floor, then returned his gaze to the mirror.
“Was this worth selling your soul?” he asked not just the men behind the mirror, but also himself.
The lights above him flicked off, casting the room into darkness — and a terrible silence.
Ed woke with a jolt to the sound of a chair scraping across the floor.
A man in a blue dress shirt, charcoal slacks, and thin, wire-frame glasses sat in front of him. He wore short-cropped brown hair above the fat cheeks of a baby face, despite otherwise appearing in his mid-30s.
“Hello,” the man said, his voice low, face professional.
“Who are you?” Ed asked.
“You first,” the man said, pulling a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and offering it to Ed. “Want one?”
“No, thank you.”
“Don’t mind if I do?”
“Go ahead,” Ed said.
The man flicked open his lighter and lit a cigarette.
Ed spoke again, “You don’t know who I am?”
“Should I?” the man asked, taking a deep drag on his cigarette.
Ed grinned, “I’d be surprised if you didn’t.”
“Well, prepare to be surprised,” the man said, “Because we don’t.”
“Who’s we?” Ed asked, the man’s smoke spiraling around him. Ed hated cigarette smoke, but didn’t give the man the pleasure of seeing his annoyance.
“You handled yourself pretty well in the parking lot,” the man said, “like you were trained.”
“Maybe because I was.”
“And yet when I ran your face and fingerprints, you didn’t show in our system.”
“Weird,” Ed said, not buying the guy’s bit for a second. Though the guy was obviously trained to counter the tell-tale physical signs of deception, he couldn’t pull the wool over Ed’s instincts.
“So, where’d you learn to use a gun like that?”
“You’d be surprised what you can learn on YouTube,” Ed said, grinning.
His smile wasn’t returned. “What’s this agency you were talking about earlier?”
“Let’s cut the shit, guy. Just tell me what you want from me, and I’ll do it. Want me to go on the 6 o’ clock news and tell everyone I’m a psycho gunman and not at all an agent of the government, fine. I’ll do it. Just, please, I want to see them.”
“Who do you want to see?”
“Jade, Teagan, and the guy, Ken. I assume you picked them up when you grabbed me.”
“Well, we’ve got two of them.”
“What do you mean, two of them?”
“One of them didn’t make it.”
Ed swallowed, not sure if the guy was pushing his buttons. He kept calm. “Who?”
“The man, Ken. He was infected so we had to purge him.”
Ed stared at the guy, trying to gauge his honesty. If he was lying, Ed couldn’t tell. “What do you mean infected?”
“He was bitten. We can’t risk bringing the infection here.”
“So, he’s dead?”
“He would’ve died, anyway. Or become one of them.”
“What are they?” Ed asked.
“You’ve yet to tell me your name.”
“Edward Keenan.”
The man paused for a moment. Ed wasn’t sure if it was deliberate or Ed saying his name had thrown him for some kind of loop. Do they really not know who I am?
“Well, hello, Mr. Edward Keenan. A pleasure to make your acquaintance. My name is Sullivan. Now, tell me, Mr. Keenan, what is it that you do?”
“Are you fucking with me? You really don’t know? Who the hell are you that you don’t know who I am? If you were a legal authority worth a damn, you’d know my name, even if you didn’t know who I really worked for. So, if you really don’t know that information, I’m sure as hell not at liberty to tell you.”
Sullivan smiled. “I’m gonna tell you what I think, Mr. Keenan. I think you think you’re something you’re not. Because trust me when I say, if you were anybody worth knowing, I would know who you are, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. So, why don’t we start over and tell me who you really are and what it is that you do?”
Ed closed his eyes, then opened them, “I’m not telling you shit until I see my daughter and Teagan. After that, I’ll sing whatever song you like.”
Sullivan stared for a moment. “I can bring you Jade, but Teagan had to be moved elsewhere.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Sorry, Mr. Keenan, I’m not at liberty to tell you.”
Sixty-Seven
Mary Olson
Oct. 18
Morning
Belle Springs, Missouri
In the last week, Mary had been forced to face an entire world gone missing, her only child thrown into unimaginable danger, and a lingering imprisonment in a godforsaken Dreary Inn. Yet seeing the brooding despair colonizing the children’s faces on the other side of the bar was an altogether different sort of torture.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said in her best sitcom mom voice. “Desmond will have a plan in a few minutes. Then we’ll either be on our way, or camping out here for another day. Either way, we’re safe. I promise.” She dropped a maraschino cherry and straw into each of the two Shirley Temples, then slid them across the bar to Paola and Luca.
“How do you know everything will be okay, Mom?” Paola said.
“I just do,” Mary answered, even though she didn’t.
“Outside,” Luca said, “it’s more of the terrible scary.”
Paola and Mary traded a glance. It was weird seeing the boy aged. Weirder still, when he still used language like an 8-year-old, rather than the young teen he appeared to be.
Paola said, “What’s the terrible scary?”
“The black stuff that wasn’t there before the bad stuff happened.”
“What
do you mean?”
“Do you ever get sad spiders?” Luca asked Mary.
She couldn’t help but smile. “Sure, I think everyone probably gets sad spiders sometimes.”
“Well, the terrible scary is filled with sad spiders. I think it might even make them. And the terrible scary gets bigger and bigger until it’s everywhere, so if the terrible scary outside is like the terrible scary I saw on the way to the lobster tacos, we have to go right now.”
Paola said, “What happens if we don’t?”
“I don’t know,” Luca said, shaking his head, “but I think we might become part of the terrible scary, too.”
A cold chill flooded Mary’s back. She poured herself a glass of water, wishing it were something harder, and drank it all in one gulp, then said, “I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?” Paola looked at her mom, quietly pleading, don’t leave!
Mary answered with apologetic eyes, but said, “I’ll be quick. I have to talk with Will and Desmond. We have to sort this out. Need a refill before I go?”
Paola nodded. Mary topped off her daughter’s drink with a quick squirt and two more cherries.
“You?” she turned to Luca.
“I’m good.”
Mary smiled, then left the bar. A minute later, she was between Will and Desmond, arms crossed, demanding answers.
“I don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head at Desmond. “You’ve been five steps ahead since this all started. We need you right now. What’s our plan? If we have to stay then we have to stay. But we can’t just stay because we’re not going.”
Mary felt herself teetering at the edge of hysteria.
“It’s okay,” Desmond said. “I’m sorry I’m indecisive, but I honestly don’t know what to do and am having a hard time sorting through my thoughts. I usually listen to instinct, but right now, I don’t know what else to say other than my Spidey sense is tingling, and the solutions aren’t showing themselves to me like they usually do.”
He found her eyes. “What do you think we should do, Mary?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, and I really don’t care. I just want to do something and I want to know what that something is. I don’t want to be scared; I’m sick of it. Impossible starts the second you let fear get bigger than faith.”
“At the risk of everyone here thinking I’m just some old hippie,” Will interrupted, “I need to go off and do a bit of my best thinking. That requires herbal supplementation, so I’m off to find Jimmy. If you still trust my instincts after this morning’s monster roll-call, I promise I’ll be back with a plan in less than half an hour. If not, well I really can’t blame you. I am an old man, after all, who’s about to go off and get stoned in our hour of need.” Will smiled, then walked off.
Desmond turned to Mary. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I feel like I’m letting you down.”
“No, you’re not letting me down. I guess I’ve just grown over-reliant on your awesome leadership. And this is all a bit ... much.”
“Do you trust Will’s advice?” Desmond asked.
“If I knew how I felt about that,” Mary said, “I’d feel a million times better. But right now, I don’t know which way is up.”
“I know what you mean. I’m not used to my instincts waffling around like this, and I’ve never felt like so many lives were dependent on me. Plus,” he looked past Mary for a second, then swallowed the sentence.
“What?” Mary prodded. “Say it.”
“There’s something about John,” he lowered his voice, “that’s making me uncomfortable. He woke up all weird. I mean, we had this heart-to-heart last night and he was way drunk, so maybe he’s feeling ashamed to have opened up to me or something. But it feels like there’s something more.”
“I felt the same way when I woke him up,” Mary said, though with everything that was going on since then, she couldn’t remember what it was that made her feel that way. She tried to think back to the moment she went into his room, but it was like a word on the tip of her tongue that she couldn’t quite recall.
Dog Vader started to bark again, staring at them from across the bar.
They stared at one another, neither saying a word. Mary wondered what the dog knew that they didn’t.
When Desmond spoke he ignored the subject of John, returning to Will. “If you didn’t trust Will, and you had to put your finger on why, what would you say?”
“That’s the thing,” she said. “I don’t think there’s been a single dishonest word to leave his lips, but I get the feeling there’s a lot he’s not saying.”
“Like what?”
“No idea, really, but I think it might have something to do with Luca.”
“I don’t know,” Desmond said with a sigh. “I think the way they showed up and he walked through the door and pulled your daughter from the brink, then went all Rip Van Winkle is just so out-there weird that anything they say or do is gonna seem weird to us.”
“Do you think Will knows something more about Luca?”
“I think he knows a lot about Luca,” Desmond said, “and a lot more than you get from idle conversation.”
The room was thick with everything Desmond wasn’t saying.
“Tell me, Desmond,” Mary said, “please.”
Desmond’s brow relaxed. “Something bothered me about Will the second I saw him. At first I couldn't figure it out, no matter how hard I wracked my brain. But it finally came to me last night.”
“What is it?”
“Will reminds me of someone I researched about 18 months back, a scientist studying quantum entanglement. Will even said something that was nearly identical to something the scientist said.”
“What’s quantum entanglement?”
“Not now,” Desmond laughed. “In simple terms, let’s say everything in the universe was once one atom. You know, before the Big Bang spread us in a zillion directions all across creation. Even though we’re all separate now, we’re still connected on some level. Everything means you, me, and everyone. We’re all entangled. And somehow, those two are perceiving things that we can’t. They knew we were here and in trouble.”
“I can see how that makes sense,” Mary said. “But it still doesn’t explain the bleakers or whatever happened to Paola.”
“No,” Desmond said, “maybe not just yet. But it’s something that makes Will and Luca a little less frightening, right?”
“I suppose so,” Mary said.
Dog Vader whined again.
“So, does any of this help us figure out what to do next?”
“It’s a piece of the puzzle,” Desmond said. “I just need some time alone to try and figure it all out and make sense of it. Believe me, we’re going to leave here. One way or another.”
Mary didn’t want to consider what Desmond meant by another.
Sixty-Eight
Desmond Armstrong
Desmond sat in a small cubicle at the far end of the temporary offices once offered to business travelers in need of 15 minutes of Internet and quiet while staying at the Drury Inn. The monitors were black, as blank as they would be for the rest of forever, and a fair reflection of the answers in Desmond’s mind.
He stared at the scribbles and sketches that blackened the three sheets of paper spread on the desk. He had no easy way out. Just two choices: frying pan or fire. And if he chose poorly, he’d end up marching everyone over the edge and into an unknown abyss.
If he could pull the edges of his mind together, perhaps he could get the colors of the Rubik’s cube to click into place. Unfortunately, his mind was frayed and splitting; each time he came close to threading a feasible answer, the seams of logic would split and tear his theory in two.
Desmond typically solved life’s problems with a simple formula:
Replicate, isolate, fix.
A mechanic couldn’t be expected to fix a problem until he saw or heard it, which is why you couldn’t just describe the sound your engine was making; you had t
o reproduce the rattle to isolate the problem.
Whether you were dealing with a rattling engine, some bad lines of source code, or a looming economic catastrophe, effective problem solving meant you must dive deep, narrow your focus, and thin your variables. Only then could you get to the best part — fixing it.
Desmond loved to fix things, and had shown natural aptitude since he was a child. It’s what made him successful in life and business. But every solution started with the variables; they paved the path for the predictors that allowed him to assess the situation and arrive at the next best steps. Yet, when the laws he once knew had softened to gelatin, even seasoned estimation was little more than guessing.
Start with what you know.
Desmond went back to the beginning.
If the entire world, or at least the few hundred miles they’d traversed, had disappeared, how were a small cluster of survivors from Warson Woods, all living next to and across the street from one another, able to survive?
There had to be a reason, and it couldn’t be geography, not with Will and the boy crossing the country from the west coast. They were the anomaly, at least from the Drury Inn side of the equation. And Will had already told him that they’d not seen another soul along the way.
They’d had plenty of unexplained drama in Missouri, but nothing compared to what the pair of travelers brought, with supernatural connections and rapid aging, not to mention a dash of dream sharing, which apparently sent them across the map to help the Warson Woods gang in their hour of need.
It almost seemed like a … plan.
But if it was a plan, someone had to be the planner.
Desmond snapped one of the hotel’s complimentary pencils, then flicked it to the edge of the desk and ran his hands through his hair.
He’d give anything for access to his hard drive and a working network. After all his team’s research on Quantum Entanglement, he couldn’t help but feel something was obvious, some connection, something that could help him, help all of them see the other side of a solution.
