We had red beans and rice for dinner. It was an instant mix that Taylor had found in the pantry. I didn’t have much of an appetite—my head was swimming, and the Vicodin made my arms and face feel heavy—but I ate anyway, trying to keep up appearances.
I didn’t say anything about Sabine. I wanted someone else to find her emptied room.
Now that the sky was once again normal—five o’clock and already pitch black, still raining hard—Floyd seemed calmer. He was still casting nervous glances toward the windows, but he was talking now and eating. It was probably just the oxycodone, but there were bursts of bubbly delirium mixed in with his chattering nerves.
“So, now that the world is over,” he asked, “what do you do?” He was addressing all of us at the table. His fork moved aimlessly through his food. “What’s your final meal? Your last words?”
“The world isn’t over,” Charlie replied, glancing up from his computer. His voice was subdued, but there was a hint of anger there, tamped down and carefully locked away. “Devon was lying. It was complete bullshit.”
“And the speed of light? The machine? The laser?”
“It was a fake. A hoax.” Charlie paused, and as I watched, something inside him changed. Slowly, his eyes went wide and his back straightened in his chair. “Or maybe, maybe what’s happening here affects perception. Maybe it just seems like the speed of light is changing, but really, really, it’s just an inability to measure things. Maybe there is something wrong with physics, but local and not at all catastrophic.” Charlie’s voice gathered speed as he went along. He was getting excited. “I bet my parents figured it out. I bet they’re out there right now, hunting down the source.”
Taylor shot me a concerned look. Her expression was grave, and there was a question in her eyes: What do we do? What do we do about Charlie?
“We don’t know anything,” I said, feeling an edge of annoyance starting to slip through my numb Vicodin shield. I turned toward Floyd and continued: “And as far as planning our last words, what’s the point? If it’s over, it’s over… There won’t be anyone left to hear. Or care. Or remember. Just words, floating through space.”
Taylor fixed me with a disapproving glare, and for a brief, surprisingly liberating moment I wanted to tell her to go fuck herself. But I stayed silent. I think I was pretty high by then.
That’s when Danny showed up.
“Hello?” the soldier called as he came in through the front door. I heard him shed his rain-drenched coat onto the entryway floor. Then he stuck his head into the dining room. He was wearing a ridiculously out-of-place fishing hat, and there was water dripping from its brim.
When he saw us there, sitting at the table, he flashed a broad smile. “If you’ve got the food, I brought the drinks,” he said, pulling a couple of bottles from a rainproof utility bag.
He glanced around the table and saw the serious expressions on our faces. His smile faltered briefly, quivering in confusion. Then it strengthened once again.
“C’mon, guys. It’s time to cheer the fuck up,” he said. “It’s time to celebrate!” He let out a brief laugh. “We figured it out. The military—your loyal military—we finally know what’s going on.”
We retired to the living room, and Danny ate while the rest of us passed around his booze. One of the bottles was amber bourbon, the other a brilliant, sky-blue bottle of gin. Leftovers from the other night, remnants of his clandestine booty. I took a long draw on the gin as soon as it got within reach.
“They found spores in the air,” Danny said between forkfuls of food. “It’s not a very high concentration—I don’t remember, something like one part in a million—but they found it. They finally found it! We’ve been unlucky up until now. We’ve been running air samples since day one, but—you see—it moves. In clouds, or waves, or something. It’s only around at certain times, and you’ve got to catch it just right.”
He smiled and dropped his fork into his empty bowl. “Once we knew what we were looking for, the experts were able to find the source. Earlier today, they found a giant mushroom.” He let out a wild laugh, amazed at the thought, or at the sheer craziness of having to say those words. “Really, it’s some type of fungus, underground, near the shore of the river, east of Riverside Park. Apparently, it’s huge. It covers nearly a full square mile.”
“The spores are hallucinogenic?” Charlie asked. He didn’t sound willing to believe. “You’re saying we’ve been hallucinating… all of this?” He gestured, weakly toward the kitchen and, I imagined, the notebook computer still sitting on the dining-room table. The emails from his parents.
“Well, yeah. It affects mood and perception. Sometimes it’s subtle, and sometimes it’s full-out catatonia. It blocks the receptors—neurotransmitters in the brain.” He tapped idly at his temple. “Like serotonin. And norepinephrine. Just like LSD.”
“But what about the sky?” Floyd asked. His eyes darted from Danny, to Taylor, and then back to Danny. “The sky was red. And crawling. There were… there were things up there. We all saw it. That wasn’t just some fucking hallucination!”
Danny smiled. I got the sense that he was enjoying his role here, telling us this stuff, answering our questions. He was a fount of knowledge, a deity, if just for a minute or two, answering all our prayers. “That’s part of its bloom, part of its cycle. It’s been fruiting, and when enough spores reach the atmosphere, light refracts off the particles, just below cloud level… And I’m guessing it’s not really as spectacular as you think it is. The sky was red, but everything else… that’s just your brain spinning out of control.”
Danny’s expression settled into serious lines, and he surveyed each of us in turn, meeting our eyes. “In fact, everything you’ve seen or heard here in the city… I wouldn’t put too much stock in it.”
Danny leaned over and dug into the pockets of his khaki pants. He came up with a bottle of pills and shook it for a second, making it rattle. “This is Zoloft. It should help. It should free up your receptors.” He tossed the bottle over to Floyd, catching him unaware. The bottle hit Floyd’s hands and fell to the floor. Floyd quickly scooped it back up. “Take two. All of you… two a day for as long as you’re here. The experts say it should help. They’ve got us all taking it.”
I sat in silence as the bottle passed from Floyd, to Charlie, to Taylor, and then on to me. They all took the pills, but only Floyd seemed eager to bolt them down. He was the most desperate, I guess, and this was his life preserver. I poured two large white tablets into my palm and stared at them for a while.
This didn’t make sense. Danny’s explanation… It was all in our heads? But how could that be? “I have pictures,” I said, raising my eyes. I focused on Danny at first and then turned toward Taylor. “We’ve seen things. All of us have seen things. Together.”
Taylor raised her eyes to meet mine. But there was doubt there, her dark eyes quivering, refusing to stay locked on my face.
“For fuck’s sake, you’ve seen the pictures, Danny!”
He flashed me a gentle smile. “What was your state of mind when you were editing your photos, Dean?” His voice was quiet, but there was a prodding needle buried there, inside his words. “What exactly did you do?”
No. I shook my head. I hadn’t altered them. I knew that. I knew what I had seen.
“People under the influence of the spore seem prone to suggestion and confabulation. They rewrite the world around them, what they see, what they experience. And they rewrite the past. The mayor’s disappearance—we think he convinced an entire room of reporters, made them believe in a shitty little piece of special effects.”
No. I closed my fist around the pills, suddenly flush with violent energy. I wanted to throw the Zoloft back at Danny. I wanted to transform the drug into a pair of tiny little bullets.
“Is that the official line?” I growled. “Is that what the government’s going to say? That we’re all just insane? None of this is real?”
“They’ve already started torching the mushroom, Dean. It should be over soon. It should all be gone.”
“But it’s bullshit. It’s a whitewash!”
My words hung in the air for a long moment. Everyone was watching me: Floyd cowed, Charlie confused, Danny looking on with those all-too-patient eyes. And Taylor… Taylor just looked tired.
“Take the pills,” Taylor finally said. I was surprised at her voice. She sounded strong. All of her doubt and confusion had disappeared. “You don’t want it to be true, do you? You don’t want an answer to this place, a solution. You don’t want it to make sense.” She smiled sadly and met my eyes. “You want the end of the world.”
I opened my mouth to protest, then quickly pulled it shut. “No,” I finally managed. “No, I don’t.” I’m not a monster.
“Then take the fucking pills, Dean,” she said. “And hope he’s right. Okay? You don’t have to believe—you don’t have to believe in any of this—but you can hope. You can hope we can end this without the fucking death of the universe!”
I met her eyes for a half dozen heartbeats. Then I nodded.
I downed the pills with a swallow of gin.
I had too much shit in my system. My blood was thick with it, a sludge of Vicodin and Zoloft and alcohol. And hallucinogenic spores, I thought. I can’t forget about those.
This struck me as funny. As I said, I had too much shit in my system.
After he finished telling us about the army’s mushroom-eradication offensive—men in full-body containment suits wielding bulldozers and blowtorches—Taylor grabbed Danny’s arm and pulled him out into the entryway. They talked. Her voice started out soft, inaudible, but it grew louder as the conversation progressed.
“—following me?” she said. Her face was animated. I could see her profile—mouth pulled wide, showing off her teeth—as she confronted Danny. “And telling Dean?” She glanced my way, saw me watching, and pulled Danny out of sight. Her voice fell back into an inaudible whisper.
I crossed to the fireplace, where Floyd was arranging kindling into a neat tepee. He took time out to pass me the bottle of bourbon. I hesitated for a moment—I couldn’t be too far from sloppy drunk—then took a swallow.
“This does feel a bit like an acid trip,” Floyd said. His voice sounded calm, thoughtful. He struck a long match and held it to the kindling. In a matter of seconds, he had the whole thing burning. “Usually, back when I did acid, I could feel it in my balls. It was almost a pain, but not quite—like someone was giving me a bit of a squeeze. I’m not getting that now. This is mellower. I wonder if we could find this shit, bag it up, and sell it. We could probably make a killing.”
“So you believe?” I asked. “You believe it’s mushrooms?”
“If that’s what they say.” He nodded toward the entryway. Danny was still partially visible, shoulder and buttock and leg poking out from behind the entryway wall. “I don’t think they’d lie about this. Not after so long.”
“But they could be wrong. They’re desperate for an answer. They want an answer just as much as we do.”
He gave me a skeptical look. I’m sure he was remembering Taylor’s words, her harsh assessment of me and my motives. Maybe I didn’t want to believe. Maybe I didn’t want to believe just as much as he wanted to believe. And in that case, whose judgment could we trust?
“We can wait. We can wait and see,” he said.
I gave him a nod and retreated back to the sofa. Charlie was back in the dining room, sitting in front of his computer. I had no idea how he was taking Danny’s news.
He probably saw it as a good thing, these mushrooms. It proved Devon a liar.
If any of that was real, I thought. If any of it actually happened. Maybe that building down there, south of I-90, is completely empty. Maybe we built the whole thing—the laser, Devon, Charlie’s parents’ hypothesis—all on our own, out of whole cloth and spit and words. Some type of mass delusion, built on suggestion and reformed, restitched memory.
Did I actually see that man dangling from the ceiling on my first day in the city? Did I see the spiders and the face in the wall? Did I see Taylor’s father and Weasel’s fingers? Or is it all just hallucination, my own inner warped mind projected out into the world? Was I complicit? Was I responsible?
And those photographs. Did I do that in Photoshop?
I was scared to look. I was scared to open the images and study them pixel by pixel, looking for cut-and-paste seams, strange gradients, and out-of-place elements.
If I found it, if I found proof that those images had been altered, what would that say? About the situation? About me?
Do I really want to kill the world?
“Just stay the fuck away!” Taylor growled out in the entryway. Danny stumbled back as she pushed her way past. She darted through the living room and up the stairs. She had a hand up over her face, covering her eyes and nose and cheeks, and she bumped into the sofa and bounced off without losing a single step. I heard her door slam shut as soon as she got upstairs.
“Women,” Danny said as he collapsed into the sofa next to me. “Fucking hell.”
“What did you see at her house?” I asked. “You followed her, right? That’s what you were talking about? What did you see?”
“I didn’t see shit. I followed her a couple of weeks ago, saw her mom through the window, and I left. I was just fucking curious, man. I didn’t mean her any harm.”
He grabbed the bottle of gin from where it sat at his feet. I let him take a drink before I continued my line of questioning. “Why’d you tell me about it, about her house? Why’d you send me there?”
“Because she likes you… and I thought it would help. Her. You. Whatever.” He shook his head and took another swig. “I guess I was wrong.” And then, exasperated: “My fucking bad!”
He offered me the bottle, and I studied it for a moment before taking a drink. The label was blurry. I was losing focus.
“I can’t wait for this shit to be over,” Danny said. “I can’t wait for the mushroom to burn and the air to clear. I don’t do well with chaos. I prefer things in their place. God in His house and man on his horse. Starbucks and movies and reliable heating. And booze on every street corner.” He gestured for the bottle, and I handed it back. My aim was off, and he had to grab for it a couple of times.
“Yeah,” I grunted. “Traffic and homework. Part-time jobs and cell phones on the bus.”
“And Internet porn,” Danny added.
“And commercials on TV.”
“Fuck it,” Danny said. He took another drink and lowered his head to the sofa’s armrest. He handed me the bottle and shut his eyes for a handful of seconds. “If you want, if you hate modern life so much, you can start a motherfucking commune when we get out of here. I’ll visit. I’ll help you weed the corn and milk the cows. Or milk the corn and weed the cows… or milk the bulls and fuck the corn.”
I was drinking when he said this, and I sputtered a laugh around the mouth of the bottle, getting the burn of gin up my nose. “Jesus Christ,” I sighed in mock exasperation. “It doesn’t even exist yet, and you’re already ruining my commune.”
“That’s what you get for being a good person, Dean,” he said, the words making their way out around a loud yawn. “Next time, try being a complete fucking asshole.”
I woke to a loud thunk.
I opened my eyes and saw Mac standing over Danny’s unconscious body. He had a splintered, weather-stained plank of wood in his hands. Danny’s head lay still against the sofa’s armrest. Blood seeped from a wound on his brow, and his eyes twitched beneath shut lids.
The room was dark. The fire had burned down to embers.
It was just the three of us here now: Mac, unconscious Danny, and me. There was no sign of Floyd or Charlie or Taylor.
In the dim light, Mac looked crazy. Absolutely insane. His hair and beard had grown wild in the days since we’d last seen him, and it looked like a dirty red corona around his face. He was absolutely caked in mud, head to foot. I couldn’t tell what color his sweatshirt and pants had originally been. His eyes were wide, and his lips were pulled back away from his teeth.
He stood there for a second, staring down at me. There was a bright glimmer in the shadow of his face: reflected light in his eyes. Then a hissing sound escaped from his mouth, and he started to swing the plank.
I tried to scramble back, tried to push my way onto the floor, but I was too late. Mac, wielding that giant piece of wood, slammed a dozen pounds of darkness into the back of my head.
And, once again, I slept.
Danny woke me up. He patted my cheeks—gently at first and then harder—until I managed to shake my head. The shaking made my head swim. There was a searing crater of pain in the back of my skull, cutting through the remnants of Vicodin and alcohol.
“What, what, what?” I sputtered, cringing away from Danny. He was a macabre specter hanging above me. A wide stream of blood had congealed against his face, cutting from his hairline down to his left eyebrow, where it had pooled and dripped down to stain the shoulder of his uniform shirt. His eyes were wild. There was spit on his lips, and his chin was wet.
“It was Mac,” Danny said, his voice hoarse and unsteady. Then a hint of doubt surfaced on his crinkled brow. “At least I think it was Mac. It happened so fast. He hit me pretty fucking hard.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “The man can swing.” I reached up and touched the back of my head, then immediately pulled my hand away. I didn’t feel any blood, but the skin up there was ridiculously tender. My touch set off a siren-paced throb, and I hissed in pain.
Danny stood up straight. His eyes turned toward the ceiling. “Upstairs,” he whispered, his voice hushed, cautious. “C’mon. Get up. We’ve got to check on the others.”
He grasped my hand and pulled me to my feet. I almost toppled forward onto the floor, but Danny grabbed my shoulder, and the room settled into place around me. I gave him a nod—meeting his questioning eyes—and tried to act strong, even as I felt the blood drain from my face, even as starbursts of light obscured my vision.
Then we moved forward and climbed the stairs.
Danny took it slow, trying to keep his steps light and quiet. “He might be up there,” he whispered, gesturing up toward the dark hallway.
We came to Charlie’s room first. He was asleep at his desk, hunched over his closed notebook computer. He raised his head as soon as Danny opened the door.
“What?” he managed, confused and bleary. He reached up and tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes. “What’s going on?”
He looked okay. It looked like he was just waking up from a sound natural sleep. Completely oblivious.
Danny raised a finger to his lips and urged Charlie to be quiet. Confused, the seventeen-year-old got up and joined us in the hallway. He fell into place at my heels, and we moved on to Taylor’s door.
The door was open, but Taylor wasn’t there.
There were candles burning on her nightstand, illuminating the room in a steady yellow glow. Her bed was made. She had a flowered bedspread—white and pink and blue—and the sheets were pulled tight, marred only by an indentation on the near edge, where someone had been sitting. I was surprised to see my camera in the middle of the bed, weighing down a crinkled piece of paper.
I pushed my way past Danny and retrieved the camera. It looked okay. It was smeared with dirt but still intact, still undamaged. Mac must have grabbed it from my room.
“Taylor?” Danny whispered, his voice taut and urgent. He spun and peered into the room’s corners, as if maybe we’d just missed her standing there. When she didn’t materialize, he stepped back into the hallway and called down toward the remaining bedrooms: “Taylor? Are you here?”
“What is it?” Charlie asked, perplexed, growing increasingly agitated. “What’s going on? And why are you bleeding?”
Danny reached up and absently smeared blood across his forehead. He ignored Charlie’s questions. Instead, he came into the room behind me and peered over my shoulder.
I turned on the camera and set it to display the most recent image. The screen lit, and my stomach dropped. My bruised head once again began to swim with vertigo.
“He’s got her,” Danny said, his voice hushed, terrified. “He took her away.”
The picture showed Taylor bound at the wrists and gagged with duct tape. There was pure terror in her eyes. I was surprised to see that look on her face. I didn’t know she was capable of such stark, unambiguous emotion; it was something she had never let me see. Would she have covered up her face, I wondered, if her hands had been free? Is this what she’s always trying to hide? Fear? Terror?
She looked vulnerable. She looked… human. Peering out at Mac, behind the camera, watching that crazed, mud-spattered lunatic. A hostage.
His hostage.
“What did he do with her?” Danny asked.
I looked up. Charlie was standing in the doorway, watching us with terrified eyes. He still didn’t know what was going on, but he understood, at least, the nature of our fear: our frantic search, Taylor’s absence. As I looked, Floyd appeared in the hallway behind him. The skater was mouthing a gaping yawn, still partially lost in drugged and carefree sleep.
I slung the camera around my neck and grabbed for the sheet of paper in the middle of the bed. “At least we know where they went,” I said, holding up the note.
It was a familiar note. The paper was worn and crinkled, crisscrossed with at least a half dozen folds. One of the corners had been ripped away, and it looked as if the bottom third had been dipped in water and then allowed to dry. The whole thing was spattered with teardrops of mud.
But the words were still legible: “There’s something I need to do, some place I need to be. I know you don’t understand. I’m sorry, Amanda.”
“Underground,” I said. My voice was weak. As I continued, the words got caught in my throat, coming out rough, devoid of emotion. “The tunnels …
“He took her to the tunnels.”