Dominion

by Greg F. Gifune

  “My wife is dead,” Daniel said, repeating what Gorton had told him on the phone. “But Lindsay’s still alive.”

  It’s not me. Tell him it’s not me.

  “You don’t—Danny, tell me you don’t believe this shit, it—he’s lying, he’s crazy.”

  “Stick around.” Bedbug lit the cigarette and tossed the Zippo onto the console. “It’s bound to get even better. Long night, know what I mean, squid?”

  “Listen to me.” Bryce grabbed Daniel’s shoulder and pulled him around, tearing his eyes from the monitors. “Lindsay went online and ran into a psychopath. She and Gorton had a thing online and they created fake identities at first—like almost everyone does—and when she’d had enough Lindsay broke it off. Gorton wouldn’t let it drop, wouldn’t let her go, and he took things too far because he’s insane. And now this ass expects us to believe that through doing this they somehow tapped into some other reality? Come on; listen to what he’s saying. You know this is nonsense, you have to know this is nonsense.”

  Daniel took hold of Bryce’s wrists and broke his hold on him. “It’s real.”

  “Danny, for Christ’s sake!”

  “It’s real. I’ve experienced it.”

  “So have you, haven’t you, Bryce,” Bedbug said, though his tone left no room to mistake it for a question. “It’s in your head even now…fucking with you.”

  Bryce shrugged free of Daniel, who was still holding his wrists, and stumbled away toward the door. “You’re both out of your goddamn minds. You want to stay here and listen to this shit that’s your problem, I getting the fuck out of here.”

  “Wait,” Daniel said, “we’re so close, it—”

  “Let him go.” Bedbug made a shooing motion with his hand. “You want the truth, he doesn’t. Can’t say as I blame him really, knowing what I know. He just wants to run. So let him run. Join the masses, go to work, buy your CDs and DVDs, pay your bills, drive your SUVs and pretend the world isn’t going to shit more and more every day, that people aren’t becoming colder and more distant every day, angrier, meaner, nastier. All is well, right? Mindless fucking drone, man, that’s all he is, all he was ever meant to be.”

  “Danny, he’s feeding you a bunch of Twilight Zone horseshit.”

  “Everyone who wants the truth eventually finds it.” Bedbug produced an oddly satisfied smile. “But it comes with a price: the realization of our true nature, which is almost always accompanied by guilt. And guilt, like truth, is a nasty motherfucker.”

  “You wouldn’t know truth if you fell over it.” He spun toward Daniel. “Are you coming with me or not?”

  Daniel slowly shook his head no.

  “That true nature’s a sumbitch,” Bedbug chuckled. “Ain’t it, Bruce?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “See now that’s just crude. Whatever happened to romance?”

  With a final look of defiance and anger, Bryce ran, disappearing down the short hallway and out the door of the apartment.

  “Exit one shit-for-brains, stage left.”

  Daniel’s initial reaction was to follow him, but he looked over at Bedbug, who was laughing hysterically, and found himself drawn back to the monitors and the form huddled in the darkness.

  Drawing on his cigarette, Bedbug leaned over the console and clicked the mouse. The image on the monitors vanished, replaced by the original running columns of numbers and odd moving shapes and designs they had displayed when Daniel and Bryce first saw them.

  “You have to come to the police with me.”

  Bloodshot eyes peered at him through vines of cigarette smoke. “After everything I’ve told you, do you really think the police are the way to go? You’re gonna trust the fucking pigs? Jesus, get in the game, Skippy.”

  “Then what do I do? You’ve got all the answers, tell me. What the hell do I do?”

  He smoked his cigarette, offered nothing more. “You’re asking me? I’m nuckin’ futs, remember? You got to figure these things out for yourself.”

  “I believe you,” Daniel told him. Memories of running for his life through dark shadows along strange city streets washed over him. “OK? I do, I believe you. I’ve seen it, I…I think I’ve been there.”

  “Maybe you still are.” Bedbug crushed his cigarette out in the ashtray then pushed a large wire harness out of the way far enough so he could move out from behind the console. “Can’t ever be completely sure, can you? Don’t you see? We’re all helpless, afraid and waiting to see what’s going to happen to us next. We’re all in the cage, man. All of us.”

  The concept left him wracked with fear.

  “Have you had dreams?”

  “Lindsay had them not long before her death,” Daniel managed. “She was being stalked in them. By herself. But…but there was something else. When she was dying she told the EMT at the scene, ‘It’s not me. Tell him it’s not me.’”

  Bedbug watched him a moment, looking deep into his eyes as if to ascertain some specific information, perhaps to set his own mind at ease in some way. “Come on in the back a minute,” he finally said. “I want to show you something.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The monitors blinked, bathing the apartment in a blue haze for a moment, then returned to their previous displays of running columns and floating shapes. Something sounded near the main computer terminal behind the console, a buzzing sound similar to bees. Daniel hesitated. He’d heard that sound before.

  “Everybody wants things separate and compartmentalized,” Bedbug told him. “Science over here and everything else over there, yeah? But remember what I told you, grasshopper. Reality—existence—is a whole cloth. A lot of what was once considered mysticism or witchcraft has since become actual science. Life encompasses everything, from the logical to the fantastic, only people can’t handle the fantastic, not really. They can’t handle the power, the knowledge it gives them. And even if they can The Man thinks they can’t, or shouldn’t. That’s why even though reality and existence are made up of equal parts science and supernatural realism, modern governments always cover up anything to do with the paranormal. Shit, the entire history of humankind and the realities we live in are made up of a union between the world of science and the occult. Always has been, always will be. Once you’re willing to accept that fact, you start to see the world and your place in it in a whole new light, dig?”

  Daniel looked away from the buzz of computers and nodded.

  “Come on.” With Daniel following, Bedbug moved through the dark apartment, past another series of large cables and wire harnesses dangling from the ceiling like electrical garland. The next room housed a futon, a free-standing lamp and a cube refrigerator. An array of dog-eared paperback books, old pizza boxes and empty liquor and beer bottles lay scattered across the otherwise bare floor, and as was the case in the main room, the few windows were concealed by dark pull-shades. The deeper into the apartment they ventured, the darker it became, as the light provided by the monitors diminished.

  As they moved past a bathroom and approached a closed door at the end of a narrow hallway, Daniel noticed the increased intensity of the caustic smell permeating the entire apartment. “What’s that smell, it’s—Christ—it’s awful.”

  “Not much I can do about it at this point, dude.” Bedbug shrugged, leaned against the door with his shoulder, and slowly turned the knob. “Go on in,” he said with a smile, the door swinging all the way open and taking him with it. “It’ll blow your mind.”

  Several additional horrid smells wafted from within the room to join the one already hanging in the air. Bedbug remained against the door, as if pinned there, the same silly grin on his face. Daniel stepped through the doorway, brought a hand to his face, blocked his nostrils and breathed through his mouth.

  The room was quite small and housed only one window, which faced the street. Unlike the others in the apartment, this one possessed no shade, which allowed the city lights to spill in and provide a modicum of illumination. But for a dilapidated couch l
ocated in the middle of the floor, the room was empty, the walls and floors bare.

  He ventured farther into the room, and as he came closer to the couch, he realized there was something sprawled out across it. The stink in the air became overwhelming, and even breathing through his mouth didn’t help, as he could now taste the stench absorbing into his tongue and the insides of his cheeks. Voices from passersby on the street below startled him, brought him back to the sounds of Boston after nightfall. Sirens cried in the distance, icy rain ticked against the window and the thunderous rumble of a large truck shook the building as it roared down a nearby avenue. The city—the world—was alive all around him, just beyond these dark and dingy walls, and yet it seemed as though the entire universe had been reduced to this dismal little room, its rotting couch and whatever lay upon it.

  With his eyes tearing he stepped closer. Next to the couch on the floor were two small plastic pails, the type a child might bring to a beach. One was red, the other blue. Daniel leaned over them for a better look. The first had what appeared to be some sort of slop in it, a kind of oatmeal-type looking mess. The second appeared to be filled with old waste. Human waste.

  Daniel stepped away. “What the hell is this?”

  “I knew you’d come,” Bedbug said from the darkness behind him. “All along, I knew. I knew even before you did, because I’ve already seen the possibilities, dig? Kind of like déjà vu. It’s real, that’s why it feels familiar. You’ve been there, done that, just not here. Not exactly, precisely here, but that feeling you get, know what that is? It’s you, Danny boy. It’s you.”

  Something or someone lay on the couch beneath an old canvas tarp. “What the fuck,” Daniel said. “Is this a human being?” He craned his neck and saw a pair of bare feet protruding from one end of the tarp. Filthy and covered with an array of open sores, they, like the rest of the body, remained motionless. “What have you done?”

  “Survival’s a brutal gig.”

  Horror pulsed through him like an electrical current as he crouched next to the couch. One hand covered both his nose and mouth, and though he was certain the person had to be long dead, his other hand slowly reached out for it nonetheless.

  A hoarse groan escaped from beneath the tarp and the body suddenly convulsed, writhing about in an attempt to free itself.

  As Daniel scurried back and away from it, his foot hit one of the pails and the slop splashed against the floor, creeping toward the window in a sickening thick stream. By the time he’d gotten back to his feet the tarp had fallen free to reveal what was left of a man. On his stomach, hands and feet bound and duct tape plastered over his mouth, he thrashed violently with more strength than he appeared capable of.

  The man’s eyes were sunken and bloodshot, his face pale and emaciated from extreme starvation, and his nude body adorned with raw wounds and an assortment of infected lesions.

  Daniel fumbled for his cell phone. “It’s all right,” he told the man, trying not to look directly at him, “it’s all right, it’s—it’s all right, we’re getting you to a hospital—just hold on.” But even before he’d pulled the phone free of his belt, the writhing and groaning ceased. The man’s body bucked a final time then went limp and silent, and Daniel knew then that he had died. His arm fell away from the phone and hung at his side limply. “Why?” he asked listlessly. “Why in God’s name would you do this to someone?”

  “He lived a lot longer than I thought he would. Shit, I thought he was already dead to tell you the truth.” In the doorway, Bedbug let out a long and painful sigh then clenched shut his eyes as if dizzy. “Like I say, can’t ever be sure who or what’ll come through.”

  “Why, goddamn it!” Daniel raised a fist, cocked it back. “Why? Tell me why.”

  Bedbug motioned to the body. “Look closer.”

  Neon light broke through the window in time intervals, washing over the man’s now peaceful face. Even in its hideously tortured state, Daniel suddenly realized who it was. He looked to the man in the doorway then back to the couch, as if to verify it somehow, but none of it made any sense.

  “You’ve been there,” Bedbug told him. “Would you want to go back?”

  Daniel’s horrified gaze continued to bounce back and forth between Bedbug and the dead man on the couch, his mind fighting desperately to somehow explain and process that which was clearly impossible. “Do they know who they are? What they are?”

  “Do any of us?”

  Daniel charged for the door. “Get out of my way.”

  “You have to send Russell back where he came from. But trust me, he’s not gonna want to go either, so you might just have to kill the fucker. And for you, Russell’s only the beginning.” Bedbug stepped clear of the doorway. “Remember what I told you. It’s a whole cloth. Like the story says, God made the world in seven days. Only God’s days aren’t like ours. One day can be millions of years. And the big secret is…the old man wasn’t done.” He held his arms out, as if presenting himself to Daniel for the first time, which in a way, he was. “Welcome to the show, baby. Welcome to the Eighth Day.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Once back in the main room Daniel found the computer monitors buzzing and crackling with life. On their own, the displays blinked and reverted back to the image of Lindsay kneeling in darkness. Mesmerized, Daniel came to an abrupt standstill.

  The image was no longer frozen.

  As before, she moved slowly and oddly, this time turning her head toward the screen as if she’d heard him. And from the corner of the monitors came another figure. Shrouded in shadow but still discernible as a person, it stood over her and put both hands on Lindsay’s shoulders. She looked up at the person, her hair falling back and away from her face.

  Bedbug strolled casually into the room. “Creepy, huh?”

  The computers blinked again and returned to black, draping the room in total darkness until the number columns and floating shapes returned to send ghostly lights along the walls, ceiling and floor.

  “How do I find her?” Daniel demanded.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Tell me.” A troubling serenity filled him. “Or so help me, I’ll take you apart.”

  A hearty cough shook him. “She’s already found you,” he answered once it had passed. “It’s all found you, you poor stupid shit.”

  “You said Lindsay didn’t use the computers I gave you to talk with Gorton,” Daniel said, fists still clenched but held at his sides. “Then how did they do it? What computer did they use to meet and talk with each other?”

  “That, Wink Martindale, is the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Keep asking it.”

  “What’s the answer?”

  “You won’t find it here.” Bedbug coughed again, and leaned against a nearby table. It was then that Daniel noticed his hands were trembling uncontrollably. He shook his head and blinked his eyes in exaggerated fashion, but the shaking only became worse, spreading slowly up his arms and into his shoulder until his entire torso was shivering.

  “What’s happening to you?” Daniel took a step back.

  “Different frequencies…different vibrations…the timing, it’s…different sometimes.” With tremendous difficulty, he forced his head up and back, so he could look across the room at Daniel. Still in the throes of seizure, forces invisible to the naked eye had grabbed hold of him and were throttling his body more and more violently with each passing second. “I’d like to thank Francis Bacon for the killer special effects this evening,” he said breathlessly, drool leaking from the corner of his mouth and slurring his speech. “See? We’re all in the cage. Just a bunch of frightened animals that have grown up in cages and are only now even figuring out we’re in them at all. Does a caged bird know any other reality? Not until he gets out and realizes there’s something beyond those bars, right? He either finds the land of milk and honey, or a living hell, answers to the universe and life and death, freedom and endless sky, or a direct flight right into a wall of glass and a snapped neck f
or his trouble. Until he steps outside the cage he can’t ever be sure.”

  In a sudden burst of impossible speed, the upper portion of his body jerked back and forth until it became a blur of motion, his mouth locked open as a hideous growl rippled up from some primal place deep within him, a place of darkness, despair and confusion, a place of violence. Then just as suddenly, it stopped and he staggered into the shadows.

  “This is insane,” Daniel mumbled.

  “That’s how it is outside the cage.” As he fell against the far wall and sunk to the floor on all-fours, Bedbug began to laugh. Lightly at first, and then maniacally, the sound growing louder and louder still, more psychotic and disturbing as the sparse light from the bank of monitors offered just enough illumination to reveal his dark eyes flashing no longer with simple madness or brilliance, but with something more, something deeper and infinitely more disturbing. “You’re outside it right now.”

  Daniel ran to the door and stumbled out onto the wet steps.

  The rain was still coming down in icy little pieces, and the temperature had grown even colder than before. Due to his speed he slipped on the steps but managed to hold himself steady with the railing as he descended the staircase two steps at a clip.

  As he rounded the end of the alley and burst into the street, he saw the same prostitute leaned against the building next door. The street was empty, no pedestrians or cars, and his vehicle looked odd by itself in the rain.

  He’d hoped to find Bryce waiting for him in the car, but even before he’d opened the door he knew he wasn’t inside.

  “He run off.” The hooker’s voice was barely audible through the rain.

  Daniel joined her against the building. She seemed startled by his sudden decision to do so, but held her ground. Unlike when he’d walked by her the first time, rather than a disposable and inconsequential archetype, this time Daniel saw a human being. He delicately cupped the side of her face. It was pasty and cold to the touch, as if nothing alive resided beneath it.