by James Maxey
Once he got behind the wheel, the sensation was even worse. He'd never driven before he got dematerialized. He'd gotten his drivers license only a month ago, and this had been with his retinal display providing every answer on the written test. His actual hours logged behind a wheel were less than twenty, and this mostly around Katrina Knowbokov's private island, where there were fewer than ten cars, total.
So, to pull out into Chicago traffic and drive seven hours down congested interstates to reach Detroit was a bit outside his comfort zone, to say the least. By the time he arrived at his destination, he felt as burned out and rattled as he had after his confrontation with Pit Geek.
The Detroit Cube was in the middle of a nice park, surrounded by older homes that had been gentrified. Just a decade ago, this had been the worst part of town, a little feudal kingdom where Ogre's gang had been the only law. But, after Rail Blade had trapped and presumably killed Ogre in a battle that flattened seven blocks of rat-infested hovels, the Knowbokov foundation had given the city grants to build a park around the thirty foot steel cube. The rusted monument seemed to speak of Detroit's industrial past. There were uglier works of municipal art than this.
The park was nearly empty by the time Ap arrived. It was windy and cold and right on the edge of sunset. Except for a bundled up man walking his dog, no one else was anywhere near the cube.
Since he had no internet, Ap had already downloaded the three programs he wanted to try into his belt.
"Magnavision mode," he said. Then he stuck a two-pound molybdenum magnet on the south face of the cube and walked around to the north. The rust brown cube now glowed green in his altered eyes. In theory, the earth's own magnetic field flowing would interfere with the magnet on the far side and his retinas would be able to spot anomalies. And, he could see, very, very faintly, a blob near the center of the cube. But what did that mean? Was he looking at a dead man-monster? Or only a hollow space?
"Well, that didn't work," he said, walking back to the magnet. He tried to pull it off. It may as well have been welded on.
"Double density mode," he said. His arms and chest burned as the muscle fibers packed within them thickened. Even with the added strength, he had to put his shoulder against the cube for leverage as he pried the magnet free.
Ap looked around, making certain no one had watched his struggles. Satisfied that he was alone, he whispered, "Ultrasound mode."
Suddenly, he heard the babble of every conversation taking place in the houses surrounding the park. He heard the chuff chuff chuff of the dog walker's pants legs rubbing together from a hundred yards away. From every direction came the rumble of traffic.
He was grateful there was no one near enough to see him since he now had four ears. The two he'd been born with were now long, stretched out, and forward facing. Two smaller ones thrust up from his temples like horns. He pressed his face to the cube and rapped it with his knuckles.
It wasn't quite right to say that he could see the middle of the cube. His mind was flooded with sensory data that he didn't possess the vocabulary to describe. It was nothing like hospital ultrasounds, where a computer converted sound into light. But what he heard intrigued him. If he understood the vibration patterns, the middle of the cube was hollow. What's more, there was a shaft down from the center extending into the ground.
"End ultrasound mode," he said.
He shoved his hands into his jacket pocket and pulled up his hood. The sun had gone down, and the wind was knifing right through him. He wandered around the park until he found a manhole cover. If he'd been online, he could have walked into the cube in his ghost mode. But he couldn't do it without GPS. The second he stepped into the cube he'd be completely blind. If he stumbled around lost for too long in solid steel, he'd suffocate. Hell, even if he had been online, his GPS signal would almost certainly be cut off the second he stepped inside. So, he'd have to do this the hard way.
In double density mode, he shoved his fingers into the manhole cover and pulled it aside. A dank smell of rot wafted up from the hole. Ap paused. What was he really expecting to learn by going down there?
He hadn't come all this way to turn back now. Activating the LED flashlight on his belt buckle, he climbed down the ladder, into a concrete tunnel about six feet high and eight feet across. To his relief, the drain was dry save for a trickle of moist sludge at the very center.
The shaft ran on a course that led it under the cube. He followed it, and right where he judged the center of the cube to be, he found that the roof was a different color than the rest of the tunnel. It wasn't exactly new, but it was definitely newer than the surrounding walls.
He switched to camcorder mode and began to record the areas of the tunnel where new concrete met old. It wasn't the most exciting evidence he could have collected, but he felt like he should leave with at least something.
Satisfied he'd done all he could, Ap turned back toward the entrance.
The tunnel suddenly turned bright as his belt light reflected against something pure white.
Ap started to speak, but a beefy hand clamped over his mouth and picked him up, slamming him back into the concrete wall. Servant stood before him, his eyes narrowed into little slits.
"So you know the truth," said Servant. "Happy?"
Ap couldn't answer.
"Ogre was a killer," said Servant. "Worse than a killer. He would have made a skinny thing like you into his bitch. You'd have begged for death when he was done with you."
Ap reached for his belt. Apparently, Servant was under the impression that Ap could only activate his powers with voice commands. While that was convenient in the heat of battle, he also had a keypad on his belt, and his best modes saved as hotkeys.
Servant suddenly lurched forward, his hand hitting concrete, as Ap entered ghost mode.
"I've read all about you," Ap said. "You're as bad as the people we're hunting. Worse!"
"Pit Geek and Sundancer are terrorists trying to bring down civilization," said Servant. "I hardly think running a gang makes me worse. If anything, the drug trade is a celebration of capitalism."
"Your gang wars killed hundreds. Most of them kids! And who knows how many thousands of people died from the poison you were peddling?"
"The only reason we were selling drugs is that weak little punks like you were willing to get on your knees in front of a stranger to get the money to pay us for another hit. You can't condemn the supply when you were part of the demand."
"I never killed anyone," said Ap.
"Everyone kills somebody," said Servant. "You think your parents weren't dying knowing what you were doing out there on the streets?"
"This isn't about me," said Ap. "My record's clean. As far as the state is concerned, I've paid my debts."
"And you think I haven't paid for my crimes?" asked Servant. "Rail Blade locked me in a metal cube for three damn months! There's no prison in the world where a man gets locked up so he can't move, can't see, can't breathe or shit or piss. I thought I was dead. I thought I was in hell! Trapped with nothing but memories, with all my rage and mental violence turned against my own soul. I thought I'd been in hell for centuries when Rail Blade yanked me out so her dad could autopsy me. They were both surprised when I woke up." He shook his head, like he was shaking away bad memories. "I was too."
"Fine," said Ap. "You had three bad months. If you'd ever been put on trial, you'd have been executed. Three months is a joke."
"I didn't find it funny," said Servant. He looked up at the ceiling, his eyes haunted as he gazed at his former tomb. "I meant what I said about thinking I was in hell. My mother was a good woman. Used to take me to church. I can't blame her for not making sure I understood the consequences of my actions. I'd been warned about hell, told to repent and give my life to Jesus. I knew right from wrong."
He looked Ap squarely in the face and said, "I know you don't believe me, but Ogre really did die in that cube. The person that woke up under Dr. Know's scalpel was a new man. Having been g
iven a taste of hell, I committed my life to Jesus. Rail Blade wasn't happy, but Dr. Know said he believed in second chances. I was just a kid, then, only thirteen."
"You were only thirteen when you ran the most feared gang in Detroit?"
Servant shrugged. "I was big for my age. Big and stupid. Dr. Know arranged for me to get back in school. It wasn't easy catching up, but I made it through high school. I was in my second year of college before Katrina Knowbokov approached me about joining the Covenant. This is my chance to make up for the bad things I did in my old life."
Ap sighed. "Fine. I guess . . . I understand second chances."
"Then we're cool?" asked Servant.
"For now," said Ap. "I probably would have taken this better if you'd just trusted me from the start and not turned this into some kind of mystery."
"Do you really think the world would accept me if they knew my past?"
"Well," said Ap. "Probably not."
"What if they knew yours?"
Ap crossed his arms. "If stuff comes out, I'll deal with it."
"You're on a good team for keeping secrets," said Servant. "Mrs. Knowbokov is pretty good at stopping reporters who snoop around into our real identities."
"How does she stop it?"
"I kill most of them," said Servant.
Ap froze.
"That's a joke," said the big man. "The boss lady is richer than Oprah. She buys people's silence."
"Right," said Ap.
"So, you drove here?" said Servant.
"Yeah," said Ap. "It was kind of a nightmare."
"I love driving," said Servant. "You want a partner for a road trip back to Chicago?"
"Why not?" said Ap. He began walking back up the tunnel toward the manhole cover. His thoughts were churning. Servant seemed sincere. And Ap was committed to the belief that people could turn their lives around. The one thing that Ap still worried about was that Servant seemed to crediting God for his conversion. Ap didn't believe in God. He'd changed because he'd found the strength inside himself to change. Servant had changed to try to get into the good graces of a mythical being. Would his conversion hold if something shook his faith?
* * *
Pit and Sunday had come to L.A. since the Pangeans had an embassy here, but Pit had a second agenda. They were a day early for their meeting. They'd made good time across the desert in their stolen Sebring. They'd put the top down and Sunday had spent most of the trip stretched out with her seat back, her eyes shielded by a comically large pair of sunglasses, lightly snoring. They'd stolen new clothes from a Goodwill in Kentucky. Sunday had picked up the garish pink sunglasses and asked, "Who'd wear something like this?" She'd popped them on her face. "They look like something a female fugitive in a bad movie would wear to hide her identity." She'd worn them pretty much non-stop since they'd been on the road.
It wasn't just the glasses that made her look like a different woman. Despite her brief fling as a biker in a leather halter-top, for most of the years Pit had known Sunday, she'd dressed conservatively. She didn't show a lot of skin and usually wore muted colors. She was now dressed in a short pink sundress with spaghetti strap shoulders. Her legs were mostly bare.
"I really need to even up the color with a tan," she'd explained.
Pit wondered if she was trying to dress like the kind of woman that Pit used to associate with. He wanted to tell her it wasn't necessary, but, on the other hand, he was the last person on earth to tell anyone anything about clothes.
He was a little worried about how much she was sleeping. Admittedly, he was keeping her up half the night. She had good reason to be worn out. But ever since he'd brought her back to life, she'd been sleeping at least twelve hours a day. She seemed okay when she was awake, and she said she'd never felt better in her life, but he wondered if she was keeping something from him.
Right now, however, she was awake. They were driving around Hollywood with a black and white Xeroxed map with fancy letters at the top that read, "Homes of the Heroes of the Old West." On the back was a list of about a hundred names. Luckily, it wasn't just heroes on the list. Frank Macey, the Stick-Em-Up Kid, was number 48.
They pulled up in front of a squat beige bungalow in a run-down neighborhood.
"914," said Sunday, squinting at the numbers on the door. "This is it."
Pit stared at the small house. There was a wooden fence hiding the back yard. A few sunflowers peeked over the top.
"Look familiar?" she asked.
It did look familiar. But it looked familiar because they'd stopped at a Kinko's in Lexington and read everything on the internet about Frank Macey. Pit was pretty sure there'd been a black and white photo of Macey standing in front of this house.
He knew, without knowing why he knew, that the house had once been painted the same yellow as the sunflowers. There hadn't been a fence. The living room had wooden floors and there had been a big black and white rug. He remembered . . . he remembered the filthy beige tiles of a bathroom covered with broken mirror shards, reflecting fragments of his face back at him.
Had he lived here?
Was he Frank Macey? The kid in the red tights had been right. With his new face, he was a dead ringer for the actor. Macey had been a recurring bad guy in the Dallas Smith, Texas Ranger franchise. He'd appeared in over thirty films. But the series ended in 1942, when the actor who played Dallas Smith had joined the army and died handling a live hand-grenade before he ever got out of boot camp. Macey had appeared in a handful of films after that, never again in a western, but always playing a gangster or some other kind of thug. He'd also gained a reputation for showing up drunk.
Macey had wound up working for the L.A. sanitation department, driving a garbage truck.
And in 1956, both Macey and the truck had simply vanished.
Pit's earliest memories bubbled up at the tail end of the 1950s.
"I said, look familiar?" Sunday asked after he'd stared in silence at the house for two minutes.
"Naw," he whispered. "I mean, yeah, a little. But not what I was wantin'. No flood of memories. I thought I'd feel like I was waking up."
Sunday leaned back in her seat. "I haven't felt wide awake in three days," she said.
"You've been sleeping a lot."
"It's your fault," she said. "You keep me up half the night. Every muscle in my body is sore."
"That just means we're doing it right."
"I still think not sleeping is my problem. When you finally do settle down, you steal the covers."
"We're lucky I ain't eaten one yet."
"You've eaten blankets?"
"Used to eat all kinds of stuff when I was sleeping. Ain't done it in years, though. Once I dreamed I was eating a big marshmallow. When I woke up my pillow was gone."
Sunday groaned. "That joke stopped being funny in kindergarten."
Pit scratched his head. "What joke?"
I woke up on the side of the highway in the middle of the desert. The sun was beating down on me something fierce. There was an ambulance parked next to me, and a man in a tan uniform leaning over me, his hands pressed against my neck.
"You just lie still," he said.
I looked around. There was a highway patrol car behind the ambulance, its lights flashing. A cop was standing at the open door of the ambulance, talking to another medic.
"Where am I?" I asked. The ground around me was all covered in trash and twisted metal. Big purple chunks of what looked like rotten meat were scattered through the debris. The air smelled like a dump.
"You're about twenty miles outside of Las Vegas," the medic said, as he pointed a small flashlight at my eyes. "You been drinking?
"I don't remember," I said. "What happened?"
"We were wondering the same thing."
"So hot," I said, putting my hands over my eyes to block the sun. I tried to sit up. The man helped me. My clothes were shredded, like I'd been chewed in the teeth of a giant machine, but my skin didn't even have a scratch.
The m
edic held a green canteen to my lips. "Have some water," he said.
I opened my mouth. He suddenly toppled over, his arm gone up to his shoulder. He fell to the ground in shock and began to bleed out.
"Tommy!" the other medic screamed, running toward his partner.
"What just happened?" I asked. But when I opened my mouth, the scraps of garbage around me began to swirl, rising in a tornado, the tip of the vortex aimed right at my mouth.
The second medic stumbled and slipped as he saw this. His right foot fell into the edge of the swirling trash.
In terror, I opened my mouth even wider as I screamed. His fingers clawed at the ground as the lower half of his body began to stretch like strands of spaghetti.
Not knowing what to do, I closed my mouth. The man's legs vanished. He didn't live but a second or two after that.
The cop emptied his pistol in me as I staggered toward him, desperate for help, completely out of my mind with panic. One of his bullets caught me in the left cheek and wound up in my inner ear, leaving me with the worst vertigo imaginable. I fell against him and his face twisted into an unrecognizable spiral of flesh. I locked my jaw shut and the front half of his skull vanished, revealing the gray-pink cauliflower of his brain.
Despite myself, I screamed again.
* * *
I found the rear door of an old ambulance in the rubble today.
I think of all those years I wandered around, longing for memories, hungry to recall what had happened the day before, let along the month before, or the year before.
If only I'd known what a gift my forgetfulness was.
Chapter Ten
* * *
No Human Casualties
PIT PARKED on the fifth floor of the mall parking deck. It was lunchtime and the place was packed. He and Sunday rode the elevator down to the second floor, where there was a walkway to the food court. The walkway was crammed with people.
"Look at them," said Sunday, sounding contemptuous. She shook her head.
"Look at who?" he asked.
"All these people!" she said. "My father said that the true criminals of the world got away with their crimes by providing the masses with bread and circuses. Crimes of the highest magnitude can take place in plain sight as long as the citizens have stores full of flashy goods and easy credit to buy whatever they've been brainwashed to want."