So, gun.
I edge around him. I nudge his arm but he doesn't respond. He's like a seed planted in the office, waiting to sprout. I stand on his right hand. I pin his left beneath a chair. I put a chair on top of his face, in case he suddenly rears up. I reach to his waist belt, and unclasp the button on his holster.
The gun comes out easily, and rests in my hand smoothly. It's affixed to his belt by a coiled bit of rubber tubing, but I can deal with that. I stand up over him. I study the gun. It looks simple enough, though I don't know shit about guns. It's heavy and gray with no branding anywhere. I look for a safety button, and see a little sliding lever with a red inner bit showing.
I'll guess that means the safety is on. I click it over. I kick the chair away, and point the gun at his staring face. It would be so much easier if he weren't looking at me.
"Look away," I tell him.
He doesn't. He stares at me like a dog. His mouth opens and closes. The bar in his face bobs obscenely.
I pull the trigger. The gun cracks slightly in my hand, the report sounds out with nothing like the bass rumble you see in movies, but more of a piercing tenor pop, amplified by the contained space.
My ears buzz. If any nearby floaters didn't know I was here before, they do now. Maybe Lara heard it too. As for the guy's face, his head, his brain, I don't want to talk about those things. It's a mess. His one good eye is still there, crumpled inward by the force of the shot and the ricochet off the floor, looking like a bloody gray toad, but at least it's not staring at me anymore.
Wait, it is. I feel his hand twitch under my foot. What the…?
I stand there in horrified silence for several minutes, waiting for whatever this is to end. Death throes? It doesn't end though. His brain has been mulched, but he's still trying to reach for me.
I aim the gun at his throat. I pull the trigger again.
Flash, bang, bloody mess. This time he is dead.
I puke a little. I get my shit together. I go over and execute the other through the throat. One shot and done. At least I learned something.
I unfasten his belt while I'm still in shock. I unfasten them both. I take both guns with their cables and blood-spattered belts trailing behind me like empty leashes, until in the gray corridor I put them down, drop to my knees, and have a mental breakdown.
11. MENTAL BREAKDOWN
In the midst of my mental breakdown, I think about Lara.
With my face pressed roughly against the fuzzy gray carpet, I remember her standing in front of the French restaurant, waiting for me, and all the possibilities that opened up. My heart was booming. Excuses for why I might have to suddenly turn and run away popped into my head, but none sufficed. I was on a course and couldn't change. Orange blossoms from the trees in nearby Madison Square fluttered down around me in slow motion, like I was a samurai heading for war.
I walked up to her with flowers in my hand, bought around the corner. She was wearing a smart cream blouse and twill orange skirt, with her mass of curly black hair condensed and twirled atop her head like a modernist sculpture. A strong twinge began to set in.
She smiled to see me.
"You look beautiful," I said, that truest cliché, all I could come up with. "These are for you."
She took the flowers and laughed. "They're gorgeous, thank you, Amo. You clean up good."
I smiled. "Thanks. They're Caribbean Lilies. I've always liked them."
She lifted the flowers to her nose. They were delicate frondy things, with many weaving purple buds tucked within a bed of long petals.
"This is a good start."
"It can only get better. Shall we?"
I presented my elbow. She took it, sending fireworks up into my brain. I strode us into the restaurant.
Inside it was classical French with a modern twist. Most of the walls and floor are polished concrete, dressed with soft down-lights and oddly placed squares of inset industrial metal, giving the impression there were a dozen hidden alcoves tucked into the walls. The techno cat was a gimmick really, hardly better-looking than those walking dogs of ten years earlier, but the lightshow was already rippling across LEDs embedded in the screen-wall. They flowed and ebbed like the soothing fake wind in the Darkness.
It took all my concentration to address the maître d'. We sat down at our table. The twinge was already a storm between my temples with Lara at the eye, and everything else was a gray swirl. She was talking, and I caught myself thinking how awful it would be for her if I collapsed and died right then. Would she ever get over it?
I pushed back. In my mind I stepped into the Darkness, and put my mouth on autopilot.
"I'm from Iowa," I told her, answering a question she possibly asked. "My folks have a little farm, they used to raise pigs but now it's just grass for feed. When I was five years old I wanted to be a pig cowboy, riding a pig around the plains. That's actually true. Then I wanted to be a football-player, then an artist, and that's what I've been doing ever since."
"I can imagine you riding a pig," she said. "Painting zombies from pigback."
I chuckled. "It's not only zombies. I do book covers too, all kinds. I used to have this great idea for a graphic novel about a graffiti artist like Banksy who becomes a superhero. Maybe I'll do it one day."
She nodded along. "Who doesn't like Banksy? I think that'd be fun. He'd fight crime and leave social justice tags at the crime scenes."
I laughed again. My left temple felt like it was going to pop, but at least it was only the left. "What about you? Where are you from?"
She tapped the flowers in their vase. I hadn't noticed the waiter bring a vase to put them in, but I guess that happened. "You were pretty close with these. I'm from St. Kitts in the Caribbean originally, but I barely remember that, we left when I was just a kid. My mom was French Caribbean, my dad was in the navy, so I'm a navy brat and I grew up all over. As for childhood dreams, I wanted to be a princess, then an astronaut, then a lawyer. Now I'm a barista. I'm sort of floating along."
My eyes prickled and my brain stewed. "It sounds nice."
"It is. I went to law school for four years, passed the bar, but the stress burned me out. I took a coffee course and ended up at Sir Clowdesley, and I haven't looked back since."
I nodded. "I know something about burning out. I was hospitalized for a while, and the doctor said I might be allergic to art."
She laughed. "That's not even a thing."
I shrugged. "For about six months I couldn't paint a thing without migraines. I can't watch movies now because they're too much art. It's getting better though."
She studied me appraisingly. "So you really do suffer for your art."
I laughed. "I suppose. I hadn't thought about it that way. Anyway, give me your hand."
"What? Why?"
I wanted to change the conversation's direction, that was why, but I couldn't say that. "Can I see it just a second?"
She frowned, then cautiously extended her arm across the table. "You're not going to read my palm are you?"
"Better than that." I took her hand. More fireworks shot in my head, rising to a crescendo. Her nutty skin was warm and smooth. What was I doing? I didn't really know. Crashing and burning, most likely. Somewhere in the back of my head a little Hank was calling from the Darkness about the Immutable Laws of Attraction.
"This skin tone is a half-shade between Fawn and Isabelline," I said, tapping the back of her hand. "I know that because I'm an artist. Have you ever heard of those colors?"
She shook her head. I winked. "They're both kinds of brown." Before she could pull her hand back I turned it over and tapped her palm gently. Classic Hank move. "This is between Ecru and Fallow. Have you heard of those?"
"Are they kinds of brown?" The sarcasm dripped off her.
"Very astute, they both are. According to some ancient peoples all colors have a meaning. If you combine these two colors," I tapped her palm and the back of her hand lightly again, "you get a kind of equation that predicts y
our personality and your future."
"So what's my future, oh seer of color?"
"Happiness," I said, and smiled sincerely. I looked in her eyes and just kept on making it up. "Everything you want. All good things for you, Lara."
I held her gaze a moment longer than was comfortable, then let her hand go. She gave a little start, like she was waking from hypnosis. It wasn't anything like that though. It felt more like a blessing. I don't know where it even came from.
"Order for me, would you," I said, while she was still looking slightly confused. "I have something in my eye."
I barely managed to get up from the table. The room spun and threatened to wash out in gray. The pain had been mounting since we met on the street, and I felt like a volcano about to blow. I weaved my blurry way between the tables and chairs and into the toilet, where I flipped down the lid and slumped on the seat.
Tears leaked from my eyes. I couldn't take it. It hurt too much. I was out there talking nonsense, and the darkness didn't help. I felt like I was going to throw up. How could I eat like this, when I was so far from hungry?
I drop to my knees on the toilet floor and rested my head against the wall. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut and wished for an angelic host to come beaming down through the roof and airlift me out. That would be awesome.
Then as if in answer to my prayer, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I barely knew what I was doing, but I eased it out. I read the message.
I'm in the Darkness, running. I just stood with Blucy for twenty minutes, doing nothing. The air is cool and the corridors are long. You're here with me, Amo. We're running this thing together. Our diviners are firing off like crazy, and we're getting it all. Potato dolls, plastic mop handles, Leatherman wrenches, whatever it calls for, we get it.
We can't be stopped. We're in this together. Breathe clear and get it done Amo. This thing is not going to take us both down with it. You out there and me in here, we have this.
I sucked in a breath. Of course it was from Cerulean, that glorious bastard. I pushed out a breath and tapped on my phone.
Sorely needed that. Thank you. Slumped in the toilet freaking out. I'm going back in!!
The hammer in my head was still clanging and twingeing, but I could face it a little longer. I got up and brushed down my knees, thankfully only dust. I washed my hands thoroughly. I went out.
Lara looked up brightly when I arrived. The mood felt different now; even I could sense it through the fog in my head. She was serious now in the same way she was flippant before.
"I ordered you mushroom spaghetti," she said. "Garlic bread. Are you OK?"
"I'm better now. Thanks for ordering, that sounds great."
We sat in companionable silence for a time, watching the light show. The video jockey played it understated, working ripples of color that threatened to become clear shapes but never quite did. Sometimes the images looked like clay on a potter's kiln rotating, but with bumps bulging in and out in strange organic ways. The cat rumbled over and mewed a Britney Spears song at us. We tossed it scraps from our starter bread, which it hoovered up then continued on its way.
Our food came and we ate, delicate dishes painted with dots and strokes of colorful sauce, more relaxed now. We talked about art and the restaurant's décor, about life in New York, the subway, the orange blossoms, our parents, but there was an undercurrent to everything now, a lovely balance of comfort and tension that made the pain in my head just manageable. This was promise.
She twirled a strand of dark hair idly around her little finger. Her bright white eyes fixed on me a lot, and I liked it. I reached my hand across the table, and after sipping her wine she let hers drop to rest beside mine. I stroked her finger with my thumb. Heat zinged between us, and we were both melting. These were the hormones that I wasn't supposed to have, and they were electrifying.
We talked about ambitions and holidays we'd been on. She liked taking long walks on the beach. I'd like to paint that. She'd make us a cup of coffee from hand-roasted beans when we come back. I'd paint that too. We got through starters and main. It filled me up, but I kept eating. She was looking at me differently now. Perhaps I'd passed a test, but I didn't know what. The bigger test was still coming. She brought it up when we'd finished our bottle of wine.
"Are you going to show me, then?"
I smiled and brought out my laptop, setting it on the table. One of the waiters came to clear away our plates helpfully. I turned the screen around.
"It's not such beautiful fare for dinner," I said. "Forgive that."
"I want to see."
I brought up the penultimate panel again, full-screen, then pointed to the right arrow on the keyboard. "You can click it."
She studied yesterday's panel for a long moment, the tower of zombies seen from high up, the ruined city, then clicked, and studied the final page even longer.
It was another image of the same tower of zombies in Times Square, but seen from a different perspective; not from thirty stories high, floating clean above the fray, but right down in the dirt of rotten bodies.
The angle was tilted sharply, looking up through a frame of zombie flesh to the tower, all the way to the empty sky, where there was a hint of a shape written in the clouds, which might have been the face of the hero's wife. It was a purposely faint resemblance, written in cottony wisps.
She was lost to the infection near the beginning of the book. Even the hero himself succumbed pages earlier, beaten down and chased through the streets of New York, dying in an ignominious alleyway behind the theater showing Cats.
In this final panel we see through his zombie eyes, and what he thinks may be his wife in the clouds. That's what he's reaching for, what they're all climbing towards.
Finally Lara looked up at me.
"I get it," she said. "I like it. It flips things on their head."
She took my hand. I did not expect that, and weirdly, instead of making the burn go up in my head harder, it took a chunk off. I let out a gasp, as the weight started to come loose. A great chunk of it calved away like Arctic ice, terrifying and exhilarating.
"You lost someone," she said. "I understand that. I know what that's like, and what it's like to want them back."
I couldn't stop my eyes from welling up. The chunk of my pain fell into the water and was gone, leaving me paralyzingly free. I could breathe again.
I nodded imperceptibly. I didn't just lose someone over a year ago, I lost everyone: my friends who couldn't understand why I was blanking their calls, my girlfriend who couldn't be with me in silence, my parents who stopped treating me like the adult son they were proud of and instead saw me as an invalid child to be treated with kid gloves, but most of all I lost myself. I lost who I was in the face of the twinges and the coma and the fear, but maybe that was somehow changing back, over dinner with Lara.
I took her hand in both of mine.
"It's just zombies," I said.
She laughed. There was emotion in her eyes too. Another chunk of pain and pressure started to fall away. Was this my mind or my suffering, I didn't know, but I dived into it. I lifted her hand to my lips and kissed it gently. She gave a little gasp.
"Let's skip dessert," she said.
I left money on the table. We hurried down the streets together. We kissed on the subway, at first tender but growing passionate and hungry. I didn't know what was happening to me. Everything really was changing. I ran my fingers through her curly hair and she whispered in my ear something about colors and lust. The street rolled by and the block came and goes, then we were in my room and moving as one, and the last of the walls of pain that had barred me in for so long came tumbling down.
I held onto her and she held onto me, both undergoing our own transformations. She was lovely and deep as an ocean. Perhaps I was something the same for her, two lost souls crossing in the dark of the fulfillment center, finding fulfillment in each other's arms.
I kissed her ear. She pressed hard against me. We moved together like
the waves, in urgent rhythmic motion.
That night everything changed.
12. DESKS
I get up, bleary with the joy and the fear of the memory.
What happened to me? What happened to the world, while the pain in my head came away?
I don't look back at the dead security guards. I don't want to see that now. Instead I lean against the glass and look down on the street below. It's getting dark. It's hard to believe it's still the same day.
A crowd is growing down below, baying for free coffee. They're bashing their heads against Sir Clowdesley. Somehow they know I'm here.
I have to act.
I smash the windows with hurled monitors. Glass rain falls outside and a blast of cool air rushes in. I lean and shout down to them.
"Hey!" They look up at me. "What's up?"
They cluster beneath me, four stories down. The thought of what's coming sickens me, but this has to be done. At least up here the sound and visuals will be muted.
It takes me a while to figure out how to unhook the first desk from its fellows. Little near-invisible catches on the underside inner rim are the secret. I unspool the cables running through it, then toss the desk contents out the window: monitors and computer towers. They each make a pleasing crunch and smash on the concrete outside.
I don't even look to see if I take out any of my groupies. Who cares? They'll get it in the end. This is just the resource-gathering stage of the game, grinding out my tower defense before I set to crafting.
It helps me to think of it in Deepcraft terms. There are flloaters in Deepcraft too. I'm just building my tower against an invasion. I'm just playing Deepcraft.
Dragging the desk up to the edge of the window is a good workout. It just fits through. I push it out halfway until it's on the balance point, like a truck on the edge of a cliff. Outside there are plenty more of the ocean lapping closer, a fresh tide of dead/infected/lost New Yorkers.
I shove the desk. It grates over the edge and dives. There are about seven of them below when it hits, and they all get crushed. A smack, a crack, and the desk tips away, clearing the impact zone.
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