The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

by Dave Hutchinson

  BACK IN THE truck, Alex said, “What the fuck’s going on, Bud?”

  “Sheriff Brandt’s concerned that the raccoon thing and the fire could be connected,” Bud told him. “Also, you had your computer hacked, right? Lost a lot of stuff?”

  Not lost, as such. Lost would have been better. “That was something else,” he said.

  Bud sighed. “Why don’t you tell me stuff, Alex?”

  “That was different. And you seem to be hearing about these things fine without my help.”

  “You do realise how this all looks from the outside, don’t you? It looks like someone has a grudge. I can’t do anything to help if you won’t level with me.” Bud turned the truck onto the main road. “Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”

  I saw something in the house yesterday that you wouldn’t believe. “No, there’s nothing else.”

  “What makes you so sure the thing with your computer isn’t connected?”

  “It’s just not.”

  “That sounds as if you have an idea who did it.”

  “No.” Alex shook his head tiredly. “No, I really don’t.”

  “Okay, you say so.” Bud pulled out to pass a tractor, pulled back in again. “I’m not saying everything is connected,” he went on. “But it does look a little suspicious, wouldn’t you say?”

  “The mind always looks for patterns, even when they’re not there,” Alex said. “That’s how we get conspiracy theories.”

  “It’s part of my job to look for patterns. That’s how we catch bad guys.”

  Alex looked out of the window for a little while. “So,” he said. “What now?”

  “We’ll wait for the fire department investigators to do their job before we make any decisions. Till then, I guess I’d ask you to be careful. You’re safe enough at the New Rose, but try not to wander about too much on your own. And if you see or hear anything out of the ordinary, tell me.”

  Bud had no idea that the boundaries of out of the ordinary had been redrawn in Rosewater County. Alex looked out of the window again. “I’m really tired,” he said.

  HE WENT TO Stu’s Radio Shack and bought a cheap, basic notebook computer and some accessories, but it was more for camouflage than anything else. Then he walked down the street to the Banner offices.

  “I was meaning to come round and see you,” Dru told him. “I could use a quote for the story.”

  “How about ‘I’m utterly fucked-off’?”

  “It’s short and to the point,” she admitted. “Maybe a little strong for our readership, though. You look terrible.”

  He sat down opposite her and told her about what had happened in the upstairs bedroom of the house the previous day. The sparks. The figure with all the faces.

  “That’s what Walt Booker meant,” he said. “There’s a description of angels in the Bible, something about them having many faces.”

  “Four faces,” she said. “One human, three animal. It’s in Ezekiel. And it’s cherubim.” She looked at him. “You think this thing set fire to your house?”

  “Bud Rosewater thinks I’m being chased by a serial killer.” He told her about the hacked files and the raccoon, and she sat back behind her desk and folded her hands in her lap, her expression unreadable.

  When he’d finished, she said, “Well, you have had a time of it. Any suspects?”

  “I don’t know any more.”

  She looked at him a moment longer, then she opened a folder on her desk and took out a sheet of paper. “A few editors ago, the Banner ran a series about local history,” she said. “The editor at the time was a man called Palgrave—a Brit, as it happens; I have no idea how he wound up here, he was long gone by the time I was born. Anyway, Palgrave tracked down the oldest residents of Rosewater County and he interviewed all the ones that would talk to him.

  “One of the residents was a farmer called Christensen, and he told this story about his father, round about the turn of the last century. He said his father saw a cherub out in one of their fields.” She looked at the sheet of paper, then passed it over.

  It was a photocopy of a newspaper article. Biblical Manifestation In Rosewater County, read the headline, which was not exactly snappy. Alex scanned it quickly and said, “Sparks.”

  Dru nodded. “‘A mist of blue light’. Mr Christensen had quite a turn of phrase, didn’t he?”

  Alex looked at the article again. “This was in 1907.”

  “It was.”

  He did the sums. “A hundred years before they even started work on the SCS.”

  She nodded again. “Which blows my theory out of the water. Looks like this has always been happening here. Although you’ll notice that 1907 is exactly a hundred years before they started work on the SCS.”

  Alex shook his head to clear it. “Sorry. Too much stuff.”

  “I told you to get out of here while you could,” she said.

  “Yes, you did. I remember that.” He took one last look at the photocopy. “Can I keep this?”

  “Sure. I still have a few volumes of back issues to go through. There might be more.”

  “You know, I wonder how many times stuff like this has happened round here and nobody’s said anything because they thought they were seeing things or they were afraid people would think they were crazy.”

  “Short of running an ad that says ‘Have you, or a member of your family, ever seen an angel or a cloud of blue sparks’, I doubt we’ll ever know.” She saw the look on his face. “And no, I won’t do that.”

  “It might be worth asking a few people. Informally.”

  “It might. And I may do that.” She closed the folder. “But I guess the question we should be asking ourselves is, what are we going to do with this?”

  He looked at her, mind blank. He tried to imagine going to Bud with it. “I don’t know.”

  “But you’re going to stick around? Angels and serial killers notwithstanding?”

  “I’ve got nowhere else to go. I’ve got to finish the book, whatever happens, or Stan’s people will sue me until the end of time.”

  “Forgive me for saying this,” she told him, “but I think the book is the least of your problems.”

  BACK AT THE New Rose, he set up the notebook. Then he went through the nitpicking process of extracting its wi-fi card. Then he sat looking at it.

  He phoned Wendy. “Do you still have the files that leaked?”

  “Delahaye ordered us to delete them,” she said. “But I copied them onto a stick. Why?”

  “Could you bring them over? Otherwise I’m going to have to start this fucking book again from scratch.”

  “You lost your laptop?”

  Well, no, I know exactly where it is. “Kind of, but it’s inaccessible at the moment and it’s probably ruined anyway.”

  “Things are a bit busy here today,” she said. “VIP visit.”

  He recalled Danny saying someone was going to be using the Presidential Suite. “Okay. Later? I’ll buy you dinner.”

  “Sounds good to me. I’ll see you around seven.”

  He hung up and looked around the suite. Then he got up and went downstairs.

  Apart from Grace, the lobby was deserted. He took the lift back up to the second floor, where there was a bar. It was the first time he’d visited it—he had a suspicion that it was the first time anyone had visited it. It still smelled of new carpeting, and the furniture looked as if it had only just been delivered. The barman had probably been standing behind the bar since the hotel was built, waiting with diminishing hope for a customer to come along.

  He ordered a beer and went over to a table by the window. The bar overlooked the main road in front of the hotel, and the occasional car and truck went by. Alex took a sip of beer, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes.

  If he was honest with himself, the urge to just get in the car and drive away from Sioux Crossing was very strong. He felt as if the wheels had fallen off his life the moment he set foot in the town. Screw Stan, sc
rew the SCS, screw Kitson, screw angels and dead raccoons, and screw the book. He could go home and try to forget they’d ever existed.

  Except he wouldn’t. As always, it was easier to stay here, not do anything. Just carry on doing what he was doing and not make a fuss. And anyway, it occurred to him that his passport was in the house. It might be okay—it was in a drawer in his bedroom—but there was no knowing when he’d be able to retrieve it.

  He opened his eyes and saw a big black SUV driving down the road outside. It pulled to a stop a few hundred yards past the hotel, and turned so it was parked across the road, almost entirely blocking both lanes. Alex took another drink of beer as five more identical SUVs came down the road. Four of them turned off into the hotel forecourt, while the fifth stopped just short and turned to block the road.

  Alex leaned over close to the window so he could see the four vehicles parked outside in a line outside. A large number of men wearing suits and sunglasses emerged from the front and rear SUVs and took up station around the vehicles. After a few moments, the doors of the second car opened and it disgorged another large number of men, who surrounded an older, white-haired man and hustled him in through the front doors of the hotel.

  Alex got up and wandered across the bar to the door, but before he reached it one of the men in sunglasses stepped into the doorway and took up station there. Alex walked right up to him, but he didn’t budge.

  “Hi,” he said.

  The man didn’t reply. Alex could see his reflection in the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses.

  “My name’s Alex,” he said.

  “Please return to your seat, sir,” the man said.

  “I really wanted to go up to my room,” Alex told him.

  “Thank you for your cooperation, sir.”

  Alex was in the mood for a row, but he could see the wire of an earpiece curling out of the Secret Service man’s ear and away down inside the collar of his jacket and the fight slowly drained out of him. He nodded and went back to the table. Outside, the cars were slowly pulling away and driving to the car park behind the hotel. He wondered why the vice president had to stay at the New Rose, why they hadn’t just helicoptered him in and out of the SCS, what he was doing here in the first place.

  A few moments later, the Secret Service man called from the doorway, “You can go now, sir,” and with a little smirk he walked away.

  THE TELEGRAPH WAS busy that evening, so they walked a little further down Main Street to a restaurant called Gino’s, which was almost deserted. Alex ordered veal, Wendy carbonara, and then they sat looking at each other.

  “Before I forget,” she said, taking a memory stick from her pocket and putting it on the table.

  “Thanks,” he said. “For a moment I thought I was going to have to start again from memory.”

  She sat back. “You’re looking better that the last time I saw you, anyway.”

  “That’s because the last time you saw me I was watching my house burn down.” He wondered how bad he’d looked yesterday, if today was an improvement. “Bud thinks it’s all connected, the hacking thing, the raccoon, the fire.”

  Wendy thought about it. “I guess you could look at it that way,” she allowed. “Seems unlikely, though, doesn’t it? To my knowledge the only person you’ve pissed off since you got here is Delahaye, and he’s not the arsonist type.”

  Alex, who was still oscillating between blaming Kitson and blaming Delahaye, wasn’t so sure. The leak of his documents could have been intended to get him fired. When that hadn’t happened, there was the raccoon, then the fire. He still had Delahaye in the frame one way or another. He said, “Well, according to Bud the County Sheriff is on top of it. And nobody’s going to try anything here; the place is full of Secret Service men.”

  “You’ve seen Gray Goose, then?”

  “Who?”

  “Gray Goose. That’s his Secret Service code name, apparently.”

  “Oh. Yeah, he turned up earlier. What’s he doing at the SCS?”

  She shrugged, and smiled at the waiter who brought their food. “The place represents a substantial government investment, I guess. He had some meetings with Delahaye and some of the higher-ups. I was not party to their discussions.”

  That had been troubling Alex ever since he got here. The project was sold to the public as the first privately funded supercollider; while it was a given that other entities would want to invest in it, that wasn’t widely publicised. He hadn’t known how to present that in the book, quite, and Mickey Olive had seemed unwilling to give him much of a steer.

  “I need a phone,” he said.

  “Didn’t they give you one here?”

  “A private one.”

  She looked at him.

  “I can’t buy a phone here with my line of credit, because someone will spot it,” he went on. “And all my bank cards went up with the house. It’ll be days before I get access to my bank account again.” Also, there was that uncomfortable feeling that Stan was watching his accounts.

  “Okay,” she said. “You could use mine. Wouldn’t that be simpler?”

  Simpler, but no more secure, and he didn’t want to drag her into it. He was still going to have to leave the county to contact Kitson, and he was going to have to think up a good excuse for that, or wait until he wasn’t such an object of attention and then sneak out for a couple of hours. “Can you lend me a hundred dollars or so?”

  “Sure. That’s not a problem. But what’s this all about?”

  “I can’t tell you,” he said. “You’re better off not knowing.”

  “This is kind of a shitty thing to do,” she said, pointing her fork at him. “I thought we were friends.”

  He winced. “Don’t,” he said. “I’m miserable enough as it is.”

  She looked at him a few moments longer, then put down her fork, took out her wallet, and handed over four twenty dollar notes and a ten. “That’s all I have on me right now.”

  He took the money and put it in his pocket. “It’ll be enough,” he said. “Thank you.”

  Wendy picked up her fork again and poked it into her spaghetti. “But you’ll tell me what’s going on at some point,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes,” he said, knowing it was a promise he was going to have to break.

  “Okay,” she said, knowing it too. She took a breath, didn’t quite sigh. “So, what happens now? Will they rehouse you?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure I want them to. I liked East Walden.”

  “You can’t want to stay at the New Rose?”

  He shrugged. “Could be worse.”

  “But you’re going to stick around? Even though someone’s out to get you?”

  “I’m not convinced someone’s out to get me.” He cut a piece off his veal and put it in his mouth.

  She deadpanned him. “You are so convinced.”

  “I don’t want to think about it,” he told her. “Otherwise I won’t be able to get anything else done, and I need to finish the book. I’ll let Bud and Sheriff Brandt worry about it for now. It’s their theory, after all.”

  They ate in silence for a while. Alex said conversationally, “When you fire up The Beast, do you get… edge effects?”

  “Edge effects how?”

  “Static discharge, stuff like that.”

  She tipped her head to one side.

  “People in town say they’ve noticed a lot a static electricity about lately.”

  She looked at him a moment longer, then went back to her meal. “I hadn’t heard that. No, The Beast wouldn’t have anything to do with that. More likely to be the weather and a larger concentration of artificial fibre carpets than normal.”

  He nodded.

  “You know,” she said, “around this point a paranoid person would be pretty much convinced there were a lot of things you weren’t telling her.”

  He almost told her about the angels, but he didn’t. Best to wait until he had some idea what was going on. He said, “It w
as just a thought.”

  “There were protests when we first started building the collider,” she told him. “Religious nutjobs, people who thought it was going to give everyone in the county cancer. I hope you’re not thinking about putting all that stuff in the book.”

  He’d heard about that, and he had in fact made a contact at County General, who had reassured him that cancer cases hadn’t spiked since the SCS went live. They had actually gone down a fraction. “Background,” he said. “I wasn’t planning on mentioning it.”

  “You’re different.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Something’s different about you today.”

  “I watched my house burn down yesterday,” he said. “That’ll change a person.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that. Not just that, anyway. You seem more focused.” She studied his face. “Not sure what on, though.”

  BACK AT THE New Rose, there was no outward sign that the vice president was in residence. Grace was as perky as ever, the Prairie Dining Room was still empty, the gift shop was still closed. No men in sunglasses. Maybe they’d all left while he was in town, although he didn’t think so.

  He got a beer from the fridge—this room didn’t have a kitchen, but its minibar was better stocked than the fridge he’d had in Boston—and stood at the window looking out over the darkened town. The presence of the vice president was something he ought to tell Kitson about, he thought. He was tempted not to, but he was starting to wonder about the junior spy. Would he really have leaked the documents, knowing there was a chance that Alex would be fired and mess up his intelligence gathering operation? Just because Alex had turned up unexpectedly and with clearly malicious intent on his doorstep? Had that one incident driven Kitson to heights of spite which had led him to have Alex’s house torched? Did that really, if he was honest with himself, scan?

  Similarly, for Delahaye, the pieces didn’t quite fit. He could imagine the administrator having his laptop hacked to see what he’d written, and then being so pissed off that he’d release the product to embarrass him. But arson? And what the actual fuck was the raccoon all about? It seemed too uncomplicatedly grotesque for either Delahaye or Kitson, unless he’d seriously misread them both.