I heard them moving about the house while I dozed. Morning sounds. Footsteps and creaking bedsprings. Quiet voices and running water. Doors opening and falling shut. The smell of cooking tickled at my nose, but my sore muscles and foggy head kept me under the quilt. Finally, a beam of sunlight found the sofa, shining orange-red through my eyelids, and I managed to pull myself awake.
By then, the house was once again quiet. The voices were gone, and there was no sign of movement. Maybe they all packed up and left, I thought. Or maybe, in the early-morning hours, I’d managed to dream them all away.
Still half-asleep, I got up off the sofa and went looking for signs of life.
I found Charlie in the kitchen, sitting at a table in the breakfast nook. The room looked different in the morning light: the sun poured in through the open curtains, bathing everything in a blindingly bright haze. Charlie was tapping away at a tiny notebook computer. When I stepped through the door, he cast a quick glance up, then went right back to work.
“Do you have a Gmail account?” he asked, still typing away.
“Gmail?” I grunted, wondering if I’d stumbled into the middle of someone else’s conversation. I rubbed at my sticky, sleep-blurred eyes. “You can’t possibly have Internet access here—no power, no landlines, no cell signal. The military’s got that all wrapped up tight. Right? Communication blackout… all that happy shit.”
“I cobbled something together,” he said with a sly smile. He spun the computer around and showed me the program on its screen. It looked like a simple email program. There was a tab at the top with my name on it (next to separate tabs for Charlie, Taylor, and everyone else), and then, down below, there was space for account information, an address line, a subject line, and a large text field for the body of a message. “If you fill in your stuff, we can smuggle it out. It’ll also capture your incoming mail.”
I stared at the computer for a moment, then, suddenly struck by what I was seeing, spun it back around and checked its rear panel. “The battery… it’s charged? Where are you getting the power?”
“We’ve got a source.” Again he flashed that sly smile.
My shoulders slumped, and I let out a disappointed groan. I’d spent over a hundred dollars on an external grip for my camera—one that took disposable batteries in lieu of rechargeable power—and I’d stocked up on a shitload of AAs. Not to mention a second battery for my laptop.
I turned the computer back around and stared at the mail program for nearly a minute. My fingers hovered over the keyboard, tense, itching to write. But who could I contact? Who would understand? My friends in California? My father? Not bloody likely, I thought. At this point, there probably wasn’t a soul in the world who had even noticed that I was gone.
As I was thinking, Taylor stormed into the house. She moved in a loud rush, crashing from the front door, through the hallway, into the kitchen. She saw me at Charlie’s computer and let out a deep cluck. “No time for that,” she said. “No time. I told Danny I’d be there at noon.” Charlie pulled the computer back across the table and resumed typing, faster now, trying to get something finished.
“Next time, Dean,” Taylor said. “Next batch.” She pointed toward my bags in the living room. “Now, get dressed and ready to go. You’ve got a lot to see here, and I figure we should start at the top. Which means moving… fast!”
I’d slept in my jeans and a sweatshirt, so getting dressed just meant swapping my shirt for a fresh one and unrolling a new pair of socks. Sabine had left my camera on the floor next to my bags. I slipped it into my backpack and slung the bag over my shoulder.
“You can’t take that,” Taylor said, nodding toward my pack as I came back into the kitchen. “Leave it with Charlie. He’ll keep it safe.”
I shook my head. “No fucking way! I came here to take pictures, and I’ve missed enough already.”
“That’s not the way it works, Dean. Unless you want it confiscated, you leave your camera here.”
I studied her for a moment. There was absolutely no give in her eyes. Reluctantly, I set the backpack down on the table. I dug out a PowerBar, then pushed the bag toward Charlie. “I can take some fucking food, right?” I growled, showing her the foil-wrapped energy bar. “Or do you want to tell me how to eat, too?”
“It’s not like that,” Taylor said, a pinched, hard look on her face. “I’m not on some power trip here. It’s just the reality of the situation.”
Charlie finished typing on his notebook. He pulled a thumb-size RAM drive from the USB port and handed it to Taylor. She gave him a satisfied nod, then turned back my way. “You’ll see,” she said. “It’ll be worth it. I promise.”
I was in a funk all the way across the river. The morning sun had burned away the dark October clouds, transforming the city into someplace new; it was no longer the gray, oppressive maze I’d run through just the day before. The streets seemed wider somehow, the towers overhead not quite so tall. And everything had been washed clean by the torrential rain, wisps of steam curling up wherever the sun touched the damp concrete. Unfortunately, I couldn’t enjoy this new, sparkling city. I felt naked without my backpack, without my camera.
I shoved my hands deep into my pockets. Empty, my fingers felt awkward, useless.
Taylor gave me time to sulk. She stayed silent as she led me south, walking a couple of steps ahead but glancing back every now and then to check my mood. After a while, those glances started to weigh on me. I felt stupid. Here I was, pouting like some petulant child.
“Where are we going?” I finally asked, trying to regain some dignity.
“The heart of downtown,” she said. “The best place to start.”
After crossing the bridge, she took me west on Sprague. The street here was deserted, but I could hear voices and laughter to the south.
“Mama Cass’s place,” Taylor said, nodding in that direction. “It’s right down there. She gets her food from the outside. Always has fresh-brewed coffee. If you ever need company, day or night, that’s where you want to go.”
I wasn’t certain about my bearings, but I knew that the hotel from yesterday had to be around here someplace. And the man, I thought, the man in the ceiling, deformed, not even human, but still reaching out. Perhaps it was a block farther south. I stuck close to Taylor.
As we passed, an abandoned building on the north side of the street caught my eye. There were words spray painted across its face, starting way up on the fourth floor. The words stretched left to right in crooked rows, stacked one on top of the other. Each letter was about four feet tall, transcribed freehand in gentle, feminine arcs. The paint was electric blue, laid out in thick, double-wide lines. It was a poem. Or as close to poetry as graffiti could get.
It read:
The last word—fall—was inscribed in the narrow space between a window and the edge of the building, plummeting all the way to the ground. The word will in the final line was traced over with red paint, making it stand out like an exit sign in a dark theater.
“Who did this?” I asked, halting to study the giant words.
Taylor shook her head. “I don’t really know. The Artist. The Poet… You’ll find stuff like this all over town. Poems, slogans. All in the same handwriting. There’s a giant ‘Fuck You’ facing I-90.” She took a step back, as if trying to pull the whole building into frame. “This one’s new, though. It wasn’t here last week.”
Poetry. The word suddenly clicked inside my head. “Sabine?” I asked. “She could have done this. She said she writes poems.”
Taylor shook her head. “I don’t think so. All of Sabine’s poems are about her vagina.” She smiled at the surprised look on my face, then gestured back toward the building. “Besides, that girl’s obsessed with the Poet. She wants to find whoever’s doing this… wants to collaborate.” She was quiet for a moment, and when she continued, there was a hint of disdain in her voice. “You know, sometimes I wonder if this is all just some big fucked-up art project for her, for Sabine. This whole fucking thing. Nothing but background color and clever commentary. A stage on which she can play. Nothing serious, no. Nothing deadly.”
I turned and studied Taylor’s profile, watching as her eyes scanned the poem. “And me?” I asked. “What about me and my photography?”
“You’re new here,” Taylor said. “You’ll learn. Sabine, on the other hand… she should know better by now.”
She glanced down at her watch and nodded westward. “Now, get your ass in gear. We’ve got an appointment to keep.”
The courthouse was a huge, blocky building at the corner of Lincoln and Sprague. It looked like a giant four-sided cheese grater, with hundreds of small windows recessed in a tight concrete grid. The newspaper building stood across from its entrance, and a cobblestone courtyard occupied the space between the two buildings. Once a well-manicured stretch of land, the courtyard had fallen into disrepair, now cordoned off on both ends of the block and cluttered with dead, skeletal trees. A fountain stood near the courthouse’s entrance, but without water, it was nothing but a twelve-foot bowl brimming with trash and leaves. There were soldiers posted at the courthouse’s front door.
Taylor led me down the street at the building’s side, away from the entrance. She stopped halfway down the block and abruptly turned toward the building. It was ten stories of industrial concrete, a drab, oppressive cliff face looming above us. There was a broken window three floors up, a neat black hole punched through the building’s face. Taylor glanced both ways—checking for witnesses, I supposed—then, in a quick, discreet motion, grabbed something from her pocket and lobbed it up through that gaping wound. As it sailed through the air, I recognized it as Charlie’s USB drive.
Why? I wanted to ask, but she started away before I could open my mouth.
I followed her back to the front of the building, tagging along like a puppy dog as she headed straight for the main entrance. The guards smiled as they saw her approach. They must not have felt threatened. They didn’t even touch the rifles slung across their shoulders.
“It’s good to see you, Taylor,” one of the men said, greeting her with genuine warmth. “And your timing’s spot-on, as usual. The captain just left.”
“Awww, that’s a shame,” she said, a campy, theatrical quality entering her voice. “And here I thought to bring him a gift!” She started digging through her pockets, searching for something, then stopped with her hand buried deep in her pants. “Ah, here it is!” she said, pulling her hand out and displaying a raised middle finger.
“Think you can give him that for me, Johnny?” she asked, turning to the second soldier.
Both of the guards laughed. “I think I’ll have to give that one a pass,” the second soldier said. “I’m trying to avoid court-martials here.”
“That’s a good idea,” Taylor said. “I still need you on the door.”
“Okay, Taylor, enough of your goddamn charm.” Still smiling, the first soldier gestured her over to the side of the door. “You know the drill.”
Taylor nodded and held out her arms. The soldier lifted a portable metal detector from a loop of cord wrapped around his belt. He ran the wand over her entire body, up her front and back and then down the length of her arms and legs. After the scan, the soldier checked her pockets, giving them nothing but a quick, cursory pat. He waved her toward the building, then turned his attention to me.
The guards handled me with a bit more suspicion. I noticed the second soldier inching his gun forward as his partner looked me over; the soldier’s hand came to rest on the gun’s butt, ready to slip forward into the trigger guard. And the pat down was much more thorough, the soldier’s blunt hands running all the way up into my armpits and crotch. He felt the PowerBar in my pocket and made me take it out. He studied it for several seconds—holding it gingerly, as if it might explode—then tossed it over to his partner. I was about to complain, but the soldier cut me short with a curt shake of his head.
“You guys are good to go,” the soldier said, stepping up to the building and opening the door. “You know the rules, Taylor. Nothing to make me look bad.”
“Don’t worry. No anarchy today.” Taylor smiled and patted the soldier on the arm. “I’m just catching up with Danny.” Then we passed into the building.
The lobby was deserted. There was absolutely no furniture here, just one long, muddy carpet runner leading to a bank of elevators on the far side of the room. Lights were glowing overhead, but most of the fixtures had been cracked open and the fluorescent tubes removed. Taylor saw me looking and pointed up toward the roof. “They’ve got plenty of generators up there. The bulbs, however… they aren’t faring too well.”
The elevators were working, but Taylor walked right on by, leading me to the stairwell at the far end of the alcove. The light inside was inconsistent. I glanced up toward the roof and watched the stairwell pulse above me, the light waxing and waning with the strength of the generators. I could hear the electricity pulsing. It was a slow, slow heartbeat.
We climbed up to the third floor.
Taylor opened the door and led the way down a dimly lit corridor. The entire floor seemed deserted. I glanced through a couple of doorways and found row after row of empty cubicles. There was paper scattered across the floor. Upturned lamps on each desk. A couple of abandoned staplers.
All the furniture had been moved away from the walls. It looked as if, abandoned, these office spaces had surrendered to some previously unknown force of physics, something that pulled desks, chairs, and cubicle walls toward the center of each giant room. Maybe, in a thousand years, I’d come back and find a dense singularity in the center of each of these spaces. Nothing but compressed office furniture collapsed in on itself.
“Here we go.” Taylor’s voice echoed back down the length of the corridor, jolting me out of my reverie.
I found her in one of the big, empty rooms, squatting in front of a busted window. She was holding up Charlie’s USB drive. “Easier than smuggling it in,” she said, a sly smile on her face.
I followed her back to the stairwell, then up three more flights of stairs.
The sixth floor was bustling with activity. It had the same layout as three floors down, but the cubicles here were arranged with ruler-straight precision. And they were occupied, full of life. Each desk supported a heavy-duty notebook computer, illuminated from above by a standing desk lamp. A mix of casually dressed civilians and uniformed officers sat hunched over these machines, studying LCD screens and transcribing text from handwritten forms. A din of voices filled the air. It was standard office chatter: rat-a-tat-tat conversation, hushed laughter, muffled curses.
The difference between this floor and the one three floors down was disorienting. The architecture was the same, but the feel was radically different. Like it was the same place—the same floor—but separated by a vast period of time.
But which comes first? I wondered. Was the third floor the past or the future? Was it an abandoned, desolate space waiting for reclamation, waiting to be filled and rejuvenated? Or was it what comes next, what happens when all of these people pack up and leave, abandoning this place for good?
“This is the military command center,” Taylor explained, noticing the perplexed look on my face. “You’ll find the bigwigs up on the top two floors, plotting and planning, arranging the infrastructure, sending out search parties and data-gathering expeditions.” She gestured into one of the rooms. “Down here, you’ve got the dregs, crunching numbers and cataloging information, trying to make sense of what’s going on.”
We continued down the main corridor, past several more densely packed rooms. Finally, Taylor turned into a smaller office. There were only four cubicles here, all of them oversized and filled with multiple monitors. At the moment, the room held only a single occupant: a soldier dressed in a natty olive-drab uniform. He glanced up from his computer as soon as he heard us enter, and a wide smile spread across his face.
“Taylor!” the soldier exclaimed. He rose to his feet and greeted her with a warm embrace. I caught the grin on Taylor’s lips and felt a moment of intense jealousy; it was an irrational reaction, I knew, but it was something I couldn’t control. She was practically beaming. I hadn’t known her for long, but still, from all I’d seen, I wanted to be able to elicit that type of reaction in her, the sheer magnitude of that joy.
As soon as he let go, Taylor introduced us. “Danny, this is Dean. He’s a photographer. He’s trying to document the situation here.” The soldier’s arm remained draped around Taylor’s shoulder, and she reached up to pat his hand as she talked. “Danny’s my spy in the military-industrial complex. He helped me get in good with the soldiers.”
“You make it sound like treason,” Danny said. He held out his hand and I shook it. He was taller than me—about six foot two—and he had a powerful frame. His dark brown hair was sheared close to his skull, letting a glimpse of skin shine through. It made the curve of his head look like a powerful, tightly flexed muscle. He had a strong handshake. “I just help her out now and then. I figure I should do my part… lend a hand to the little guy.”
Danny smiled. He had a perfect smile—a warm, winning smile—and that bugged me to no end. “A photographer, huh,” he said, and he gave his head a tiny little shake. “You should be careful out there. The captain sees the press as public enemy number one, and he’s already got a couple of newsmen locked away at Fort Lewis… Frankly, I think he just doesn’t know what else to do.”
I nodded, remembering the Jeep with the P.P. plates on the outskirts of the city. Maybe I wasn’t falling behind. Maybe there weren’t any competing photographers in the city. Not anymore, at least. But the threat of prison—not even prison, I realized, but military detainment as some type of enemy combatant—made me feel downright nauseated. No guts, no glory, I told myself, but the feeling refused to go away.
I took a deep breath and watched as Taylor handed Danny Charlie’s USB drive. He sat back down at his computer and plugged it in, double clicking an icon as soon as it appeared on the screen. After a couple of seconds, Danny removed the drive and handed it back to Taylor.
“What was that?” I asked. “What did you just do?”
“Charlie’s program,” Taylor explained. “We load up all of our email, Danny plugs it into the military network, and it launches a burst of encrypted data out into the real world.” She smiled at the phrase. “Charlie’s got a server on the outside—decrypts all of that information and forwards it on. It also downloads all of our incoming mail, along with the latest news from a bunch of sites.” She held up the tiny drive. “It’s all in here, ready for us to start surfing at our leisure. We do it every couple of days. We’ll get you hooked up next time around.”
“And the military doesn’t know? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Nah,” Danny said, dismissing the concern with a wave of his hand. “Charlie’s got it streamlined down to a couple of hundred packets. As long as we aren’t sending out high-definition video, it’s barely noticeable. Besides, I know guys who surf hard-core porn from their military terminals. Next to some of the nasty shit I’ve seen on their screens, this is tulips and butterflies.”
“He also recharges for us.” Taylor pointed to a power strip beneath the soldier’s desk. “I’m sure he’d do your camera for you.”
I nodded. The thought of throwing my battery charger up through a third-story window didn’t exactly fill me with joy—when I was a kid, I never played Little League, and my throwing arm was for shit—but it was nice to know I had the option.
“And now that we’ve got business out of the way…” Taylor took a step back, leaving me hanging over Danny’s shoulder, transforming the two of us into unintentional conspirators. “Why don’t you tell Dean about what you’re doing here? Catch us up on all of that great government progress.”
Danny gave Taylor a scowl, then turned back to his computer. He popped open a window and started scouring through directories, looking for something. “What do you know, Dean? About the phenomenon?”
“I’ve been following it on some underground message boards, and there’s been some stuff that hasn’t made it into the mainstream press. Some strange pictures. Some video. Vague, translucent figures, weird physics. Kids in a cell-phone video, bouncing a ball through a—” I paused, trying to think how best to describe it. “—a sticky space in the air, where the ball just slows down, then speeds up again, finally stopping and hovering in midair. Everybody knows something’s going on here—there’s no denying the quarantine or the government’s refusal to talk—but nobody knows exactly what. Some type of terrorist attack, maybe. A chemical leak. A haunting.” I smiled at this last suggestion. “Maybe something to do with an ancient Indian burial ground?”
Danny didn’t smile. “Yeah, we’ve got a lot of scientists trying to figure it all out. Here, on this floor, we’re just gathering information. We catalog incident reports—from civilians, from our soldiers on patrol—and look for patterns.” He lifted a clipboard from the clutter on his desk. It held a photocopied sheet titled REPORT OF UNEXPLAINED INCIDENT. This particular sheet had been filled out in red ink.
Before he set it back down, I managed to read a few of the neatly typed questions:
13) What were your thoughts before, during, and after the incident? (Please be as specific as possible.)
14) What emotions did the incident evoke? (Fear? Amusement? Regret?)
15) Do you feel compelled to seek out similar experiences?
The person who had filled out this particular form had drawn a shaky red line through question 15, as if he or she were trying to strike it from existence—the question or the compulsion it described, I didn’t know.
“And what have you found?” I asked.
“A lot of stuff.” Danny shrugged. “And nothing.” He pointed to a white dry-erase board tacked to the opposite wall. There was a list of six bullet-pointed items sketched out in bold black letters. “We’ve narrowed the phenomena down to six basic categories. First, you’ve got your visitors—people and things appearing where they shouldn’t be, where they can’t be. Celebrities driving through town in BMWs. Dead politicians. We’ve even got a cluster of random people who swear they saw the Empire State Building rising out of the west end of Riverfront Park, but I’m guessing that one’s just complete bullshit. On the flip side of that, you’ve got our second item: disappearances. People and things that should be here but aren’t. Things that just… cease to exist. There’s a whole block in the industrial district out east—it used to be warehouses, with streets and trucks and loading docks. It’s all gone now. Nothing but flat, bare earth. And you know the mayor, right? You’ve seen the video?”
“The mayor? That was real?” I didn’t bother trying to mask my surprise. “That video made the rounds, but everyone dismissed it as a fake. I’ve seen page after page of analysis. There are splices! And they found the actress, the woman who goes on stage after the mayor disappears. She says she did it for her friend’s video project.”
“Nah,” Danny said, his face lighting up with a bright smile. “All of that stuff came from us. Misinformation. Brilliant, really! We couldn’t stop the video from getting out there—it was broadcast live, after all, on national television—so we flooded the Internet with fake copies. We added splices and artifacts. We even dubbed over some of the crowd noise, to make it sound like bad acting.”
Danny opened a new window on his computer screen and launched a video clip. It was the same press conference I’d seen a dozen times before, but in amazingly clean, high-definition video—better than broadcast quality, better than anything I’d ever seen. And there was no distortion, no artifacts, no obvious splicing. It showed the mayor answering questions, getting angry, then disappearing.
In front of cameras. In front of a whole crowd of reporters.
“We put an emergency injunction on everyone in the room, requiring them to stay quiet. The woman who comes on stage—” Danny pointed to the sharply dressed woman as she stepped up to the lectern; he stayed silent as she looked around and shook her head. “She was his press secretary. She’s in New York now. We hired an actress to come forward and claim credit for her role.”
Danny shut down the video and swiveled back around. “Truth is, the mayor’s gone. He disappeared—right that day, right that millisecond—and he hasn’t been seen since. And the video gives us nothing. Just—one frame he’s there, with that pissed-off look on his face, and the next frame… poof!” He popped open his hand, showing me an empty palm.
I stood dumbstruck for a moment, trying to process this information.
“Yeah,” Danny said. “Just blows your fucking mind.”
I glanced over at Taylor, thinking she’d break down laughing at any moment, revealing this whole thing as a big fat joke, but her face remained perfectly still.
“Anyway, after visitors and disappearances, we’ve got sounds without sources.” Danny pointed back to the whiteboard. “Voices emanating from empty rooms. Displaced screams and crying. Hell, for two days an invisible gun battle raged outside the convention center; a lot of people heard that one.” Danny shivered, and his voice dropped. “You could call them auditory ghosts, I guess. They usually come at night. We’ve got people who can’t sleep for all of the things they hear.”
I remembered the soldier at the barricade. I remembered the wistful, nervous look on his face. He’d seemed like a haunted man, talking about his transfer out of the city, about how he no longer heard things.
“Next, we’ve got creatures. Either animals completely out of place—flamingos in the park, clouds of butterflies in the middle of the night—or things that don’t exist, things that shouldn’t exist.” I nodded, remembering the dogs—the wolves—from the night before. Amanda’s animals, with those strange, extrajointed limbs. “There’s some scary shit out there,” he said. “We’ve found bodies. Bodies with tooth marks or clawed nearly in half.” Danny shivered again; I wasn’t sure if this was a genuine reaction, or just something he did to provide emphasis.
“Our fifth category is a little more difficult.” I glanced up at the board and saw the phrase “mental problems.” “We’re not quite sure if it’s a phenomenon in its own right or a result of everything else. It’s just… people going crazy. Acting odd, unusual. Losing memories. Going schizophrenic or catatonic. It might be a result of all this stress, or it might be something else. Another symptom of this… disease.” Danny shook his head and managed a sad little smile. “In my time here I’ve had two commanding officers fall apart. One was struck dumb by complete amnesia. The other attacked three of his men with a knife… before turning it on his own genitalia.”
I made an involuntary wince.
“And the final category?” I asked.
Danny gestured back toward the whiteboard. “Miscellaneous,” he said, offering up a pathetic shrug. “The last of our all-encompassing groups. Just… everything else.”
I stared at the board for a long time, waiting for a pattern to emerge, waiting for some type of connective thread to surface and tie it all together. But there was no thread. There was no pattern. The categories remained disparate, unconnected things—except for visitors and disappearances, which could have been flip sides of the same coin.
And miscellaneous? It seemed like these people, these experts, were stumbling around in the dark here. They had no idea what was going on, and their categories did nothing to illuminate the situation.
The hotel room—that frightening tableau, now burned into my memory—remained just as strange, just as alien.
I walked over and tapped the board. “In this… in this miscellaneous category, have you heard anything… like…” I groped for words, trying to figure out how to explain the body in the ceiling. “Has anybody seen somebody melted—a human body, just kind of merged with a ceiling or a wall? Limbs and body parts disappearing into solid objects?”
Danny shook his head. “No. Nothing like that. Not that I know of.”
“Is that what you saw yesterday?” Taylor asked. I turned and found a concerned look on her face. Not just concerned, but startled, going pale. “You saw a body? In a floor?”
“Well, I…” I shook my head. Pinned beneath that intense stare, I felt flustered. I felt a blush rising up beneath my collar. “No, not really. I’m just…” I composed myself a bit. “I’m not sure what I saw.” I shook my head, trying to dismiss her concern, trying to escape the sharp look in her eyes. “Just forget it.”
They both continued to stare at me, Danny curious and Taylor… well, there was something strange—something hungry—about Taylor’s expression.
“So what have you figured out?” I asked, trying to redirect the conversation. “After one, no, two months on the job, what have your experts deduced?”
Danny shrugged. “Nothing much. The doctors and scientists say there’s some type of chemical imbalance in the population here. Neurotransmitters. In the brain. They don’t know what’s causing it. They’ve been giving antidepressants to anybody who wants them, to boost serotonin and dopamine levels. It seems to help. Some.”
“Help with what?”
“With everything.” He nodded toward the list on the board: visitors, disappearances, sounds, creatures, mental, and miscellaneous.
“But it isn’t all mental, is it? There’s genuine physical phenomenon here.” I gestured toward his computer screen, where the mayor’s video file—09–07-pressconf.mpeg—remained highlighted. “Are you saying that a liberal dose of Prozac would have stopped the mayor from disappearing? That something physical—and impossible—was caused by errant brain chemicals?”
“All we know is that people on the drugs are involved in fewer unexplained incidents. The correlation is there, small but statistically significant. And believe me, that’s killing our scientists. It’s something they just don’t want to hear.” Danny double clicked his mouse and restarted the press conference video. “So yeah, maybe if the mayor had been on Prozac, it would have been different. Or maybe it wasn’t the mayor. Maybe if everyone else in the room had been on Prozac…”
Danny trailed off. On his screen, the mayor once again popped out of existence.
“At least it doesn’t follow you out,” he said, his voice hushed, suddenly sedate. “Once you’re outside the perimeter, the neurotransmitter levels even back out. The weirdness stops. Things return to normal.”
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief.
“Yeah,” Danny agreed. “Welcome to Spokane.”
“We’ve got to go,” Taylor said. She gestured toward the door with a little sideways motion of her head. “The captain should be back any time now.”
Danny got up from his seat and gave Taylor a kiss on the cheek. “Day after tomorrow?” he asked.
Taylor smiled. At his touch, all the gloom and concern dropped away from her face. “It’s a date.”
“They’re trying the hospital again tomorrow morning. They’ve got grappling hooks this time. Just like Batman.” Danny turned and gave me another appraising look. He clasped me by the shoulder and shook my hand, once again flashing that perfect smile. “You might want to check it out, Dean. Probably some good photos in it for you.”
I nodded.
Taylor led me back through the building—down the stairwell and across the lobby. She exchanged good-byes with the guards at the door and headed east on Sprague, back into the web of downtown buildings. We both stayed silent for a couple of minutes, walking at a comfortable pace.
Finally, Taylor broke the silence. “Danny’s commanding officer—the captain—would shit a brick if he knew about our little arrangement. He’s got an issue with civilians in the city. Wants to crack down and force us all out. He certainly wouldn’t like to see us walking the halls of military headquarters. That said, he’s not above breaking rules if it suits him. He’s got some type of deal with Mama Cass—lets her food shipments get through in exchange for a free lunch every day.” She raised her wristwatch. “Noon to one. Predictable as clockwork.”
“Are you and Danny an item?” The question just bubbled out, a flash of fire from deep in my gut. A surprised look appeared on Taylor’s face, and I felt an overwhelming need to fill the ensuing silence. “It’s none of my business, I’m sure. It’s just… you seemed really happy together. I was just wondering.”
Suddenly, a loud gale of laughter wracked Taylor’s body, the force bending her nearly double. “For a photographer, you’re not very observant,” she said, wiping a tear from her eye. “I’m not his type. Really. The way he was looking at you… I think you’re more to his taste.”
“What?” Then, after a moment: “Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.” Taylor once again started down Sprague. After a couple of steps, she cast a glance back over her shoulder. The laughter was still there, lingering in the corners of her smile. “He’s a good guy, a good friend. If you’re looking for a date, you could really do a lot worse.”
I blushed, feeling stupid, then hurried to catch up.
When we got back to the house, Amanda and Mac were in the kitchen making grilled cheese sandwiches. Amanda was tending to the Coleman stove while Mac leaned in over her shoulder. His arms were wrapped around her waist, and she was laughing, squirming in his grasp as he nuzzled at her neck, rasping his whiskers against her pale flesh. As soon as she saw me enter, a look crossed over her face: a momentary darkness, like a cloud across the sun.
Those animals. Those dogs. Those things. After last night, it was something we shared. A bond.
“Hungry?” she asked, momentarily breaking free from Mac’s grip. She gave his hands a playful little slap.
“God, yes,” I groaned. The smell of bread frying in butter and the sharp tang of cheese had already started my mouth watering. I was running on empty. I’d slept through breakfast, and Taylor’s soldier friends had stolen my PowerBar.
“And Taylor?” Amanda asked. “How about you?”
Taylor shook her head. “I had a big breakfast,” she said, brushing past me and sitting down next to Charlie.
As far as I could tell, Charlie hadn’t moved a muscle in our absence. He was still sitting at the kitchen table, still perched in front of his computer. The only thing that had changed was the addition of a half-finished sandwich resting at his elbow. Taylor handed him the USB drive, and he grunted a distracted thanks.
“I was thinking I could show Dean the park,” Amanda said. “Maybe later today.” She slid a sandwich from the skillet to an empty plate, then walked it over to the table. I took a seat next to Taylor.
As she handed me the plate, Amanda gave me a slight nod, and for a brief moment, her face became pinched, her eyes suddenly imploring. It was a fleeting expression, and when she straightened back up, the look was gone, hidden beneath a smile. “You’d like the park,” she continued. “People see things there… animals, sometimes. You might get some good photographs.”
I nodded, getting her message loud and clear. When I glanced back over to the stove, I found Mac watching me with a confused look on his face. He’d seen something between the two of us, no doubt the wrong thing.
I started to say something—I don’t remember what: a question for Taylor, maybe, about Danny and the military—but a loud bang shocked me out of my thoughts. I turned and found Charlie standing bolt upright in front of his computer, his chair overturned on the floor. He stood like that for a long moment, a stricken look on his face. Then he slammed his laptop shut and darted out of the room.
He fled the house, leaving the front door standing open behind him.
I glanced over at Taylor, but she just shook her head, her eyes wide.
After a moment of paralyzed silence, Mac started to move. He took several steps toward the front door, going after Charlie, then pulled to an abrupt stop. He took a step forward, then a step back. It was like some halting, tentative dance, a ballet of confusion and adrenaline. Amanda, meanwhile, stayed on her side of the room, fiddling with the dials on the Coleman stove.
“What…?” Mac finally implored, turning toward Taylor. “What just happened?”
Taylor stood up and moved over to Charlie’s computer. She opened the lid and pressed the space bar a couple of times, waking it from slumber. After a few seconds, the hard drive spun into motion and the screen flickered back on.
I recognized Charlie’s email program. There was an incoming message open in the main window. Charlie’s address—cd01@gmail.com—was listed in the “to” field, and the subject line had been left blank. The sender was listed as admin@spokane.wal.net.
There was no text in the body of the message, just a single picture. File name: sherman_today.jpg.
The picture showed a woman standing on the corner of an abandoned city block. She was a black woman, at least forty years old, maybe forty-five. She had straight shoulder-length hair. Her body was turned away from the camera, but she was glancing back over her shoulder. It was a candid shot, and she looked distracted, worried. The street was shrouded in mist, disappearing into white oblivion a half block up. It looked like early morning, just before sunrise.
There was a street sign on the corner. The pole was bent at a severe angle—at least thirty degrees off vertical—but it was still readable, its green reflective surface practically glowing in the early-morning haze. It was the brightest color in the whole frame: SHERMAN ST.
Taylor reached out and touched the computer screen, gently tracing the length of the woman’s body. She glanced up. Her eyes were wide, darting from my face over to Amanda and Mac.
“It’s Charlie’s mother,” she said. “She’s here. Downtown.”