by Weston Ochse
They’d go into a drop zone covered in searing napalm for him, if Boy Scout asked. And he’d do the same for them. But Boy Scout was beginning to think that they’d be better off without him. After all, they couldn’t help him with astral projection or astral combat. Sure, they could Google shit for him and give him advice, but they had their own lives to life.
Preacher’s Daughter glanced at him and then his arm. “Your arm—it’s better.”
He nodded. “Whatever effects I had from touching the yazata didn’t linger long.”
“Yazata?”
“It’s what Faood called it.”
“Let me see what we have in the database.” Her keys flowed over the keyboard. She lowered her voice. “Otherwise, are you okay?”
He grimaced. “It’s just been a long couple of days.”
“I was referring to Sister Renee,” she said.
“I know what you were referring to. She had darkness inside of her. What she did, she did for a reason. She didn’t want to be a victim. She didn’t want me to be a victim either. She tried to be a hero.”
Preacher’s Daughter stared at the ground. “I wish she hadn’t done it. We don’t need any more heroes.”
“I feel the same way.” He now had the memory of pushing the woman off the platform, just as he had the memories of the woman’s fingers smelling of oranges.
Poe entered the main room, moving fast. When he saw Boy Scout he stopped.
“Take care of what you needed to?” he asked, referring to the phone.
“I did. Faood does have the daeva at the consulate,” he said.
Poe flashed his gaze to where McQueen was checking weapons.
Then it clicked.
Boy Scout’s eyes narrowed. “You knew? But how?”
Poe inhaled as if it was going to hurt him to say something, but Boy Scout beat him to the punch.
When he spoke, he enunciated each word carefully. “You listened to my conversation.”
Poe’s lips pursed and he shook his head minutely. “Wasn’t me. It was 77 Central. They monitor all Special Unit 77 coms. I should have told you.”
“You gave me a phone for a private conversation and you knew it wasn’t going to be private?”
“Come on, Boy Scout. Can the self-righteousness. We have an existential threat of unknown origin on American soil. It’s my job to protect against things like this.”
“Special Unit 77 wants the daeva. Why now?”
“Members of the subcommittee made it known that they want us to capture the specimen for study.”
“Specimen. Interesting term for a Zoroastrian deity.”
Poe shook his head. “This is a military unit, regardless of what we look like. If you want to be a part of it, then start acting military, Boy Scout.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What’s the first thing you do as a leader when your people are targeted?”
“Protect them first, then remove the threat.”
“And that’s what we’re doing. Are you going to go back to your room and meditate on this, or do you want to be part of the tip of the spear?”
If there had ever been any doubt about it, that confirmed Poe was definitely not a lieutenant. A first lieutenant would have pissed his pants rather than confront Boy Scout like that. Boy Scout had seen it happen on two occasions, one when he’d returned to discuss a vehicle failure with the motor chief after he and his team had to run seven miles in full gear from the site of the piece of shit Hummer, another when an officious lieutenant wouldn’t give him the extra ammo he needed for his team.
“I asked you a question, Boy Scout.”
“I heard you, Colonel. Count me in.”
Poe frowned, but humor reached his eyes. “Good. Then bring your team up to speed and be ready. We leave tomorrow morning at 0600 hours.”
Then he exited out the door and was gone.
When Boy Scout turned back to his team, both Preacher’s Daughter and McQueen were staring at him.
“Enjoy the show?” he asked.
“Immensely,” said Preacher’s Daughter. “Just missed having popcorn.” Then her face got serious. “Why’d you call him colonel?”
“Look how old he is. Do you really buy the oldest lieutenant in the army schtick? There’s no way he’s a lieutenant,” McQueen said. “He carries far too much wasta.”
She nodded to herself. “Which was why I sucked at military intelligence. You spoke with Faood, according to Poe, and discovered that the daeva is there.”
Boy Scout pulled up a chair and relayed most of what the conversation had been about. He concluded with, “You’ve got to understand, talking with Faood in many ways is like talking to Rumi. He’s full of all sorts of odd sayings that can mean many things.”
“Lay one on me,” McQueen said.
Boy Scout pondered, then said, “Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.”
“Hey, I like that one.” McQueen rocked back in the office chair. “Be notorious. Like a T-shirt or a bumper sticker. Give me another one.”
“Intellect can get you to the door, but it can’t get you into the house,” Boy Scout said.
McQueen stopped rocking. “That’s harder. What’s it supposed to mean?”
“It means we need more data,” Preacher’s Daughter said. Then she went still and snapped her finger. “You just reminded me of something I read.”
“You actually read?” McQueen asked. “I mean, other than Better Homes and Gardens and Oprah?”
“Are you getting fat, McQueen?” she asked. “I think you might be gaining weight. You working out enough?”
His smile dropped as he chewed the corner of his mustache.
“Anyway,” she said, rolling her eyes from McQueen to Boy Scout, “speaking of doorways, there’s this thing that scientists call the doorway effect. They based the title on research done at the University of Notre Dame. The idea was to try and explain why the brain partitions information a certain way. For instance, when you carry something from one room to the other, once you leave the room you came from, there’s a better than average chance you’ll forget why you were going to the other room or what you were supposed to do with the object in your hands. Because the subjects were tested in the room and then after they left the room, scientists were able to determine that moving through the doorway had an effect.”
Boy Scout leaned forward with interest.
“Distance didn’t have the same effect as the doorway,” she continued. “Subjects were tested after walking the same distance with the only differing operand being a doorway and, in every case, going through the doorway affected the ability of the subject to remember. What is it about a doorway that causes the mind to partition or replace a human’s random-access memory? This suggests that there’s more to the remembering than just what you paid attention to, when it happened, and how hard you tried. Instead, some forms of memory seem to be optimized to keep information ready-to-access until its shelf life expires, and then purge that information in favor of new stuff, like a computer would have RAM.”
“Aren’t you talking about ROM?” McQueen asked.
She shook her head. “That’s Read Only Memory. Think breathing, the heart beating, etcetera. The body’s ROM is what it needs to merely survive. By being read only it can’t be overwritten. Imagine if it was and suddenly you stopped breathing because the code would no longer be there.”
“Deleterious,” McQueen said, nodding sagely.
“Deli—” She laughed. “Deleterious indeed? Were you just playing Scrabble or something? More like devastating. If that happened you might not have enough time to even say deleterious.” She sighed. “Where was I before Mr. Scrabble joined in?” She snapped a finger. “Right. So ROM covers everyday functions. RAM is short-term memory that gets you through the day, and the hard disk is where memories are stored. So again, what is it about a doorway that makes the brain decide to overwrite the mind’s RAM?”
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“The mind is a strange machine. My PTSD proves it,” Boy Scout said. “There are those who have done far less than I have whose minds can’t deal with that they’ve seen and done. Do you think that the more doors you’ve gone through—metaphorically—the easier it is to deal with everything you’ve seen?”
“Certainly the more experiences one has, the better their mind should become in organizing the information,” she said. “For instance, a person who has never traveled might find themselves completely lost in a large airport because they have no frame of reference—no information on the hard drive. But me, or you, or even our fat gay hipster over there—”
“I’m not fat,” McQueen said.
“Wouldn’t have a problem, even in an airport in a foreign country without any signs in English. Know why?”
“Because we can bring our experiences to bear and use them to figure out the current configuration,” Boy Scout said.
“And this is all done by the mind accessing the hard drive and placing the needed information in the RAM.”
“I am not fat.” McQueen repeated. “This is muscle.” He flexed his arms and sucked in his stomach. He seemed disappointed that it wouldn’t suck in more.
“Sure it is, dear,” Preacher’s Daughter said.
“How does this apply to the doorway effect?” Boy Scout asked.
“I was thinking about the entities inside of you. They knew who they were and what they were back before they passed into The White. Then they passed into you. That’s two completely different doorways. The White was a universe that could be molded by those within. The reason we called it The Whitewas because it was featureless until we did something to it. I bet that’s the same thing with your mind and I don’t think they know where they are.”
McQueen nodded. “Like the airports. These entities had never been in an airport or the mind of a middle-aged semi-broken former Army Ranger, so their minds don’t know how to explain it to them. And I’m not fat.”
“As they go from one door to the other, they forget what they were going there for,” Preacher’s Daughter said. “We know that the boy was a suicide bomber and never meant to enter The White in the first place. What his mind must have done to try and come to terms with his environment must have been quite the mad scramble. And you are too fat.”
“That’s something that’s been bothering me,” Boy Scout said. “Those things that entered me in The White were in the shape of spiders, something either created by my mind or the mind of something else. In essence though, they didn’t exist. Yet they had a complete mind—ROM, RAM and hard drive—that entered into my already filled mind. Why don’t I feel like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag?”
Preacher’s Daughter gave him an iffy smile. “Now we’re getting into quantum physics. How can two things occupy the same space? How can your mind transfer from your body into a netherplace? I think there’s probably the science to explain it, only we don’t know it.”
“I’m not sure it’s all science,” McQueen said. “Explain the daeva using science. Remember what the daeva said to you? It was around long before humans ever walked the Earth. How does science explain that?” he asked Preacher’s Daughter.
“Maybe the daeva don’t live in our same reality. Boy Scout and I talked about it, but I really have no idea. Like I said, this is quantum physics. Supernatural is merely something our brains can’t parse naturally. Like the airports or your brain, Boy Scout.”
“Nothing natural about his brain,” McQueen muttered.
“With the yazata we have an interesting concept,” she said. “If it takes on the aspect of the being it last eats, in this case you mentioned something about an Englishman, then each entity it absorbs is another doorway. Consider that it has probably lived for thousands of years. If it needs to be fed regularly it might have absorbed thousands of souls, each being a different doorway or identity. I’m sure early on it knew what it was and who it was, but over time, after absorbing so many others, it’s probably more a collection of all these other parts than its original identity.”
“What you said was just spooky smart,” McQueen said.
“It sure would explain why it doesn’t know what it is. But if what you’re saying is correct, there’s still an echo of Sister Renee inside of here,” he said, pointing to his head. “And if I let it consume another soul, she will be gone forever.”
“That seems to be the case. You might not be able to avoid it if you want to survive, Boy Scout.”
“I don’t even want to think about crossing that bridge. Damn if this isn’t becoming a horror novel. If I had the ability, I’d look up and tell the author to stop it right now.”
“I don’t automatically think that just because we can’t explain something, it has to be out of a Stephen King novel,” she said.
“Said the woman who marked her entire body with religious symbols, then wrapped herself in cellophane and tinfoil,” McQueen said.
She pointed a finger at him. “Hey, that was a dream. That never really happened.”
“You didn’t know it at the time,” he said.
“Welcome to quantum mechanics,” Preacher’s Daughter said. Then she added, “And you definitely are too fat.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Hollywood Boulevard
THE PROBLEM WITH a direct assault on the consulate was the dervish’s ability to put people who watched their dance instantly to sleep. The assault team could show up wearing McQueen’s glasses, but then the dervishes would know that the assault team knew about their ability, and thus had to be connected with Boy Scout. If the assault team showed up without them, they’d be susceptible to the dervish’s powers. All of that was beside the point anyway, because a direct assault would create a diplomatic nightmare.
Working with Special Agent Ripple, Poe had devised a plan that was equal parts subterfuge and chance, and for loss of a better idea, Boy Scout had gone along with it. There was no doubt that the dervishes still wanted Boy Scout and his team, but using them as bait again in such short a time span seemed farfetched. Still, the idea had merit, so they conferred with Boy Scout. In the end, he went with their approach, asking only for a single concession.
Which was how he now found himself standing on Ray Bradbury’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, wearing nothing but regular clothes and an earpiece for coms, thinking about the movie The Illustrated Man, based on three of the author’s short stories and starring Rod Steiger. The idea of the film was that Rod Steiger’s tattoos represented startling versions of the future, each with its own terrible realities. Although the movie wasn’t very good—inculcating some of the weirdness that movies of the 1960s seemed to have had—the image of the tattoos shifting and acting on their own always creeped Boy Scout out.
Honestly, he hadn’t thought of that movie or the author for years, but being so near the star brought it all back in a wave. Even when he’d sat in the chair of a tattooist outside of Fort Benning twenty years ago, seeing the tats on his tattooist and the flash on the walls, he’d started to wonder if maybe they would move if he dared to stare hard enough. Which was why he’d gotten up and left, had never gone back, and had never gotten a tattoo, even when his friends begged him to do so. He just didn’t want the reality to change. He wanted the world as he saw it to be just that.
Which was incredibly ironic considering his current circumstances.
Boy Scout had come to find out that the world was nothing like he thought it was. What he saw was carefully chosen outer garments and make up. Villagers in Iraq weren’t mere villagers. Fishermen in Somalia weren’t mere fishermen. And Afghan colonels who professed to be good men were really pedophiles hiding in plain sight, at least in the case of Sharif. And now Boy Scout wasn’t actually Boy Scout. He was a man harboring a soul-eating yazata and a woman had killed herself to save him, only to fail in the process.
Boy Scout shook his head to clear his thoughts, then took inventory of his surroundings.
All around
him were stars, monuments to those who’d been famous. Some were lost to time despite their stars and some commemorated for specific events. But the stars remained as memories for what they once had been. Even so, were the stars really who they’d been? Or were the stars merely avatars of who the world thought them to be, five-pointed mnemonics to jumpstart memories of where they were, when they were, and what they were doing back then.
And, of course, there was Hollywood Boulevard. The street was as busy as it ever was.
Cars cruised bumper to bumper at less than ten miles an hour, slow enough for the odd pedestrian to jaywalk between them.
Starbucks had a line out the door, as if it were the only place coffee could be had.
A TV star he recognized dodged into the Hollywood Suit outlet across the street—evidently the advertisement of Three Suits, Three Shirts, Three Ties, Three Socks for $399 a draw even the elite couldn’t pass up.
Tourists of all ilk ogled the windows, occasionally stopping on one of the stars on the Walk of Fame to photograph themselves or loved ones, then relate a story about how the honoree had changed their lives or made them happy or had been a role model.
An older couple with liver-spotted hands and feet enclosed in black socks and sandals posed near a hooker and pimp to take pictures on a no-shit camera instead of a cell phone.
A group of twenty-something women, half-sloshed from mid-afternoon adventures on the strip, walked arm in arm down the sidewalk across the street, singing the theme song from Gilmore Girls.
A young man wearing a pressed black shirt and pants hurried down the street, late for some waiter job and probably dreaming he’d be discovered and able to star in a movie alongside Brad Pitt or George Clooney.
The sidewalks teemed with foot traffic, some local but most clearly from out of town. If Boy Scout had really wanted to lose himself in a horde of people, he could have chosen to stand in front of Kodak Theater or Mann’s Chinese Theater. There, in addition to the masses trying to match their footprints and handprints with the famous, were men and women dressed convincingly like Superman, Batman, Lady Gaga, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Rocky Balboa, and Tyrion Lannister, among others.