by Keith Thomas
17
10:04 P.M.
NOVEMBER 13, 2018
MARCY-LANSING APARTMENTS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
ASHANIQUE LAY IN BED with her headphones on.
No music played, just a muffled white sound—a combination of Ashanique’s own breathing and the dull but constant thrum of the city outside.
The headphones weren’t actually plugged into anything.
The jack was tucked under Ashanique’s pillow.
Janice had gotten the headphones secondhand from a thrift store she passed regularly on her commute home. She and Ashanique went a few times a month, largely for coats and shoes, but frequently eyed the electronics in a glass case by the register. There were the usual decades-old castoffs: the five-disc CD player, the ancient Nintendo Game Boy, the portable DVD player with a cracked screen. More and more, headphones were showing up. None of the fancy brightly colored ones Ashanique noticed on the street. But, a month ago, when Ashanique saw the ones that were still in the box and advertised “noise-canceling” on the side, she begged her mom to get them. White and black, they cost fifty dollars.
Janice said she’d think about it, but she stopped by the store on her way home from work a week later and bought them. Though there really wasn’t an occasion, she gave them to Ashanique for an early half birthday. Ashanique was delighted and danced around the apartment wearing them like earmuffs. The Marcy-Lasing Apartments were never quiet and the noise-canceling feature was a godsend. Around 10:00 p.m., when Ashanique typically went to bed, the noises began. The couple in the apartment right above theirs fought for hours. He’d throw things against the walls. She’d scream and stomp her feet. Sometimes, their arguments got so heated that Ashanique would sleep on the couch with a pillow over her head. But it wasn’t just the sound from above: at night the apartment complex seemed to come to life.
Once, Ashanique had caught a few minutes of a PBS nature show about the Ecuadorian jungle. In the show, a camera tracked a jaguar as it made its way through a moonlit landscape. The narrator mentioned how loud the tropics got at night—how every nocturnal animal shrieked and chittered and howled as darkness fell. The Marcy-Lansing Apartments were the same. All the tensions, all the worries, all the anger that the residents had kept bottled up during the day spilled out when the sun sank from sight. All that tension emerged in shouts and whistles and echoing laughter, in fists pounding against doors, in dog barks in stairwells, in the blare of car horns, and the constant throb of window-rattling bass.
For Ashanique, putting on the noise-canceling headphones and then closing her eyes was like falling through a trapdoor into a snowbank of silence. Invigorating and, simultaneously, palliative.
After the first few nights of using the headphones, Ashanique began to hear things in the digital hum. Voices. Songs. Birdcalls. Things like that. At first, the sounds were soothing, like listening to her mom whisper on the phone in the other room. There was a security in the sound—the feeling that when she closed her eyes, when she let the world just take her, her mom was watching, listening in. But as time went on, the sounds embedded in the white noise took on a more ominous quality. She heard sounds like footsteps, creaking, and laughter. She knew it was just her mind making stuff up, but with George’s memories suddenly pouring into her head—and other, richer memories right behind—she wasn’t so sure anymore. Maybe, she wondered, what she was hearing were the echoes of other people’s lives.
The door to Ashanique’s bedroom opened and Janice walked in.
She sat on the edge of the bed and gently took the headphones off.
“Hey, baby girl. You doing okay? No cramps or nothing?”
Ashanique shook her head.
“And the things you’ve been thinking?”
“I’m okay, Mom.”
“Good. Listen”—Janice took a deep breath in and released it slowly, like she had just taken a drag of a cigarette—“I think it’s about time we moved to a new place. It’s loud here. Doesn’t exactly have the best neighbors most of the time. Things haven’t been so great at work lately, and I thought, maybe if we moved out of the city a ways, just for a while we—”
“This is about the doctor who came here, isn’t it?”
“No. No, hon. I’m not mad about that anymore. This is about you and me. Things are going to change, like I told you. I know you understand. Everything will work out just fine, but it might be a bit crazy for a while. I might be a bit . . . saltier. But you know it’s just stress, right? That I don’t mean it. It’s not personal.”
“Yeah, Mom.”
Ashanique slipped the headphones back on and rolled onto her side. Janice rubbed Ashanique’s back, her fingers playing along the girl’s spine. After a few minutes, she got up, switched off the lights, and closed the door.
With the door closed and her body relaxed, Ashanique fell asleep quickly.
• • •
Janice woke at 3:00 a.m.
She could hear someone in the hallway outside the apartment.
Suddenly keenly awake, Janice got up off the couch and slipped the Glock 17 out from its hiding place in the bathroom. Safety off, she tiptoed to the front door as silently as possible. Her heart already a jumble, her sympathetic nervous system approaching overdrive, Janice peered through the peephole into the darkened hall just outside her front door.
Get ready, girl. They’re here.
Two men stood just outside the door. They wore dark coats, but she could see green scrubs beneath. Even with their faces barely visible behind surgical masks, she knew why the men were there and who they were looking for. One of the men pulled a lockpicking kit from his coat and approached Janice’s door. Slowing her breathing, she readied the Glock.
Night Doctors.
Those two words pummeled themselves into Janice’s brain.
More than twenty years on the run, more than fifteen different apartments, more than a dozen different names, and here they were. She knew it was because of Matilda. And that was because she’d been lazy, gotten too comfortable, too secure. Now it’s come back to bite you in the ass. There was a trail now—an invisible thread connecting Janice and Ashanique to the outside world.
It needed to be severed. And fast.
But first, they needed to survive this night.
Janice took her finger from the trigger, tucked the gun into the back of her sweatpants, and ran, bare feet padding quietly as a cat’s, to the bathroom. The number of locks on the door, including a complex magnetic lock, ensured she had a few minutes. Maybe even five. Eventually, the Night Doctors would get frustrated enough to just kick the door down.
In the bathroom, Janice removed a loose tile from the wall, reached inside the hole behind it, and pulled out a plastic bag filled with MetroChime—the pale-colored pills in silver blister packs. Janice stuffed the bag into her pocket and grabbed a windbreaker on her way to her daughter’s room. As she passed the front door, the knob rattled. Janice considered putting a bullet in the door and seeing if she hit anyone on the other side, but it was too risky.
Janice gently woke Ashanique and covered the girl’s mouth.
“I need you to grab some clothes and your shoes.”
Ashanique went wide-eyed seeing the Glock in her mother’s hand.
“I need you to do it as quick as you can, okay?”
Ashanique nodded.
Janice let her go and Ashanique got out of bed and, eyes still glued to the gun, gathered clothes—jeans, underwear, two T-shirts. As she grabbed her things, bundling them into a plastic bag from her desk, Janice could hear voices whispering behind the front door. Her heart raced, her hands shook from the adrenaline. A ragged noise began, like metal being filed against metal. Like teeth grinding.
“Who are they?” Ashanique whispered.
Janice just shook her head and put a finger to her lips.
As silently as possible, they crept toward the back of the apartment.
Then came a sharp, loud rap on the front door. It
was not a human fist knocking but the sound of locks being punched out. Pop. Pop. Janice heard the metal locks hitting the floor. The brutal crunch of breaking wood filled the interior of the apartment. Janice imagined one of the men had grabbed a fire ax from down the hall and now he was chopping his way inside.
“We need to move fast, baby.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know, I know.”
Janice wrenched open the window behind her bed, overturning the two frail potted plants Ashanique had been trying to revive since she found them in a dumpster two months ago. Neither pot shattered, but the thud was obvious.
Within seconds, they were on the fire escape.
As Janice helped Ashanique through the window and closed it, she looked back and caught a glimpse of the Night Doctors scrambling into the hallway. They both held knives; long filleting blades that glinted in the half-light like silver fish at the bottom of a murky stream. Janice had seen what those knives could do. Even though she had been a child at the time, the memory was lodged deep into the core of her being—the knife was drawn, it cut the air like a whistle, and then it slid across a perfect expanse of bare flesh, leaving a red and glistening wave in its wake.
Don’t go back there, Janice told herself, not now.
Janice turned her attention back to the fire escape.
Ashanique was in front of her, scrambling down the rattling metal steps. Janice followed; she did not look back again. When their feet hit the cold asphalt of the alleyway, they ran toward the sounds of traffic.
This was the moment she’d spent years preparing Ashanique to face. In fact, they’d played out this very scenario only a week earlier.
Janice was proud of how Ashanique held herself, how focused she was. When Ashanique was six years old, all her school friends were giggling in gymnastics or taking piano lessons while she was learning urban survival skills. How to filter and purify water, escape an evasion, handle firearms, and take apart pens to make lockpicks.
She would need that strength and training for what was to come.
18
4:31 A.M.
NOVEMBER 14, 2018
FOUR SEASONS HOTEL
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
RADE STOOD NAKED before the floor-to-ceiling mirror, wearing only wireless headphones.
Philip Glass’s “Facades” played at maximum volume as Rade scanned his body. He did this every day, though he wasn’t particularly vain. He was looking for corruption, for the animal breaking through.
The hotel room around him was spotless.
He’d inspected it carefully before the room’s actual occupant, a businessman from Ohio with sagging jowls and clubbed nails from ulcerative colitis, returned from a dinner at the chain steakhouse across the street. Rade surprised him and, nude, wrestled him to the ground before he broke the fat man’s neck between his thighs. He stuffed the man’s body into the bed frame beneath the mattress and sprinkled it with the sodium hydroxide he’d ordered from a soap manufacturing supply store.
Rade prided himself on being meticulous.
He considered his work an extension of himself: the long shadow he cast out into the world. Rade wouldn’t go so far as to say what he did was art. He wasn’t pretentious. Well, at least not that pretentious. But this thing he did, it was a calling, and he took it very seriously. Staring at his face, violins sawing back and forth to a metronome rhythm in his ears, Rade couldn’t help but consider himself handsome. It wasn’t the hard edges of his face or the brutalist plugs he called eyes, it was the gravitas. It was the awesome power—a sort of biblical sway—that seemed to radiate from him.
I am the next stage, he told his reflection, crushing the base.
Rade noticed a blond hair poking up on his left shoulder. It was only visible in direct light and he had to roll his shoulder to see it properly. Maybe two centimeters long. Rade picked up a pair of medical tweezers from the nightstand by the bed. He plucked the hair carefully, ensuring it didn’t break off at the root. Holding it tight in the tweezers, Rade examined the hair with the dutiful gaze of a scientist.
This is my battle.
Each hair a soldier to destroy.
Each hair an inch of ground to take back.
To win the war, he just needed to clear the hangers-on from his head.
Rade walked the hair over to the toilet, dropped it inside, and flushed it away. As he watched the water spin in the porcelain basin, he ran his hands over his hairless arms. His skin was soft and warm. He touched his face, his fingers tracing the supraorbital ridge where his eyebrows had once been. The skin there was so thin.
Rade did not consider himself human.
It was not something he admitted openly.
Rade didn’t know what he was exactly—a spirit? A demon?—but he was certain that he was trapped in a hairy, vile body. One that sprouted hair in the most unlikely of places; that shed skin and grew useless nails; that oozed foul liquids; one plagued by strange, unnecessary urges.
Rade looked out at the world, the civilized world of cities and cars and tablet screens, and saw only apes poking away at technology they didn’t understand. He saw gibbering, wide-eyed hordes of animals on the highway, and he cringed at the very thought of being surrounded by them in elevators, malls, and sporting events. Even the best and brightest luminaries of the scientific world or the champions of literature were just less hairy monkeys scratching at ingrown hairs, struggling with bowel movements, and salivating over bulges.
No, Rade was sure he wasn’t human.
He was lighter, cleaner, and more efficient. And he was changing his body, redesigning the brute his mind was trapped inside, to become . . . something more. Rade was pushing into the chrysalis stage. Whatever his final form would be—and he had many ideas, ranging from the next stage of human evolution to a being composed entirely of light—it would finally make him feel whole, comfortable on this planet.
Rade returned to the floor-to-ceiling mirror with a duffel bag in one hand and a bowl of hot water in the other. This was his process. His ritual.
“Facades” began again, on a perpetual loop. Watching himself, his movements careful and calculated, he opened the duffel bag and removed a scouring pad and surgical soap. He applied the soap to the pad and then dipped it into the water before he cleansed himself. Every inch of exposed skin was scrubbed. He washed his penis but had no urge to masturbate; he looked at the organ between his legs the same way he’d look at his earlobe: a weird evolutionary adaptation for a bestial creation. Sure, the organ’s purpose made sense and he’d indulged it in every way imaginable—from the most innocent pleasures to the most decadent horrors. Regardless, he now saw the pinnacle of joy as moving free of his physical form. And that time would come soon. He was sure of it.
Twenty-two minutes later, Rade stepped from the shower and toweled off.
His skin was bright red. Scoured.
Rade walked back into the main room and stood naked before the immensity of the night. The moment was broken by the buzz of his cell phone. Returning to the duffel bag, he kneeled down beside it and removed a single latex glove. He pulled it on, slid off his headphones, and answered the cell.
“Rade.”
“Fifty-One is on the move,” a woman’s voice said.
“Where?”
“Washington Park.”
“And what is near there?”
“The university. We expect they’re heading to the medical center.”
“She have the girl with her?”
“Yes.”
Rade hung up and dropped the cell phone on the bed.
As he pulled off the latex glove, he noticed a tremor in his right hand: his index finger twitching with a life of its own. Suddenly furious, Rade grabbed his index finger and twisted it. Hard. Ignoring the pain, he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let the air out slowly. As his lungs deflated, he refocused himself. In his mind’s eye, he saw a clock inside his chest; a series of overlaid gears, each ratcheting into synchroniz
ation. When he’d visualized each gear turning in perfect alignment with the gears in front and behind it, Rade opened his eyes.
His index finger stopped twitching.
Rade walked back into the bathroom and pulled two MetroChime capsules from a pillbox tucked into his shaving kit. He chewed them carefully, enjoying the resulting bitter mush. He knew he had to go—back into the morass of humanity, back into the animal fray.
Soon, he told himself, soon. . . .
It was only a matter of time before his body’s infantile rebellions stopped; only a matter of time before he could ignore the constant babble of his older selves.
Rade was certain his next incarnation would be as a being of light.
19
6:12 A.M.
NOVEMBER 14, 2018
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
MATILDA WALKED DOWN the hallway to her office wishing she’d showered.
She’d had a fitful, awful night.
Every time the heat kicked on in Lucy’s room, the resulting snap-and-rush sound shook her from a sleep as tasteless and dry as expired crackers. Matilda finally left around 5:00 a.m. She pulled her mom’s blankets up and kissed her on the forehead—Lucy lay still, her lower lip trembling.
Matilda was nearly to the highway when she realized she wasn’t actually tired—sore, yes, but very much awake. Her brain firing on every neural cylinder it had. She drove to work outside of herself: what psychologists refer to as self-hypnosis, her conscious brain unaware of the traffic or the stoplights; her body in full control of the car; her mind focused on Janice and Ashanique.
What is their story? What is Janice hiding?
After she’d parked in the garage, Matilda did a cursory search to see if Janice had a social media presence. She found the woman had no digital history at all. Matilda tried the university’s electronic medical system. The only thing she turned up was a poorly scanned PDF copy of Janice’s signature on a “consent to treat” form and a HIPAA notification. Both collected by Todd eleven months earlier. It was enough to cover her ass if Janice showed up ranting and raving about HIPAA violations and wanted to talk to the review board or file a complaint, but gave her precious little to work with. There was one curious thing: there were timestamps for each instance the PDF had been viewed. While it had remained unmolested for almost a year, someone had looked at it three hours before Matilda got to it.