“I only went for a drink with him,” he said, half to himself. “Have you seen him lately?”
“Yeah, he’s out at the Facility, pissing people off.”
“Now? Right now?”
She looked at her watch. “I guess. He was there when I left.”
Alex looked around the cell, trying to get his brain to work. “I need to talk to Bud.” He got up and went to the door and started to hammer on it with the flat of his hand. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey!”
“Alex?” said Wendy from the bed. “What are you doing?”
“Hey!” Alex shouted again. Abruptly, the flap in the door snapped open and a police uniform moved into view. “I need to speak to Chief Rosewater,” Alex said through the flap. “Right now.”
The officer outside bent down slightly to see into the cell. “Sir,” he said. “Step away from the door please, sir.”
Alex took a couple of steps back. “I have to speak with the Chief,” he said. “It’s very important.”
“The Chief’s not here, sir,” said the officer, a man named Jackson.
“I need to get a message to him then. Right now.”
“I’m sure we can get word to him, sir,” said Jackson. “In due time.”
“That’s no good.”
“To be fair, sir, you’re in no position to tell me what’s good or not.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Wendy said. She got up off the bed and came over to stand next to Alex. “Can I go now, please?” Alex heard a faint jingling sound, looked down, and saw Wendy’s hand, down out of Jackson’s sightline. Her car keys were dangling from her fingers. They exchanged glances, and she shrugged.
“Sir, would you step back further?” Jackson said. “If you do not, I will be forced to mace you.”
Wendy looked at him. “What the fuck did you do?”
“I made the mistake of talking to strangers,” Alex told her, unobtrusively taking the keys from her and taking another step back.
Jackson’s key turned in the door, and it opened, and Wendy moved forward all of a sudden, crowding Jackson to one side while berating him about something in a loud voice. Alex slipped through the door behind her, turned right, and ran down the corridor away from them. He heard shouting, but didn’t look round.
There was another door at the end of the corridor, this one with a crush bar on it. He hit the bar and the door opened and an alarm went off everywhere in the building. More shouting, behind him, and people running.
He was in another corridor, this one lined with office doors. It made a right-angle turn about halfway along, then came to a dead end. “Bollocks,” he said. He tried one of the doors, and it opened onto a small office with a desk and a couple of chairs. He slammed the door shut and dragged the desk against it, just as something large and annoyed hit the other side.
The office had a window. He pulled the blinds open and found himself looking out on a little patch of grass at the side of the building. The window was locked. He picked up one of the chairs and swung it and it just bounced off the glass. Of course they’re going to have toughened glass; it’s a police station. He swung the chair again, and again. On the third try, the glass starred. Not tough enough, though. Another swing cracked the glass, and with the next the window suddenly shattered into thousands of tiny round-edged particles. Alex climbed out, dropped to the ground, and took off at a full run from the police headquarters.
Wendy’s car was parked down the street. By a miracle, he’d actually wound up running towards it. He skidded to a stop beside it, unlocked the door, jumped inside. The engine started first time, which was also a miracle. He put the car in Drive and sped off down Main Street, jumping the red light outside the Telegraph. He spotted Dru Winslow standing on the pavement.
Well, that was absurd. He looked in the rearview mirror and didn’t see any police vehicles in pursuit, which was also absurd. He was also going in the wrong direction. If he wanted to get out to the Facility he was either going to have to make a five-mile detour or turn round and go back through town and where were the police?
He’d got about a mile out of town when his phone rang. He took it out and thumbed the answer icon.
“Now what do you think you’re doing, Alex?” asked Bud.
“Your security is terrible,” Alex told him. “What sort of police station do you call that?”
“Just come back right now and we’ll forget this ever happened.”
“It wouldn’t be happening at all if you’d been there. I know who did it.”
“Did what?”
“Everything. My laptop, the fire, Kitson. Everything.”
“Fine, well, you come back to headquarters and we can talk about that.”
“Not a chance.”
There was silence, at the other end of the line. Then Bud said, “Okay, then. Who is it?”
“If you wait five or ten minutes, I’ll tell you.”
“That’s not going to work, I’m afraid, Alex. I know exactly where you are because I’m tracking your phone. I’ve got officers and Sheriff’s deputies heading to your position right now. There’s nowhere for you to go.”
Alex took the phone from his ear, looked at it. He couldn’t throw it out of the car; he needed its sockpuppet ID to get into the Facility. He said, “It’s Larry Day.”
Another silence. Alex took a left, then a right onto a bumpy farm road. Bud said, “Fine. Now stop the car, wait for my officers, and let us deal with it. Okay?”
“Not okay.” He was having to fight the wheel one-handed. He put the phone on speaker and dropped it on the passenger seat. “Not at all okay. He set fire to my fucking house.”
“Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. This is not the final act of a Hollywood movie, Alex. You’re not the hero going to bring down the villain single-handed while the Law bumbles about in the background. We’re actually smarter than you.”
“You’re not smarter than him, though.” A fence was coming up, strands of wire strung between wooden posts. Alex put his foot down and the car went straight through and slewed out into the field beyond. The suspension bottomed and he almost bit his tongue in two before he regained control. “I’m really sorry, Bud, but I’m a bit busy right now.” He reached over and switched off the phone.
Fine. So here he was, bouncing across the fields of Iowa in what was, to all intents and purposes, a stolen car, without anything even resembling a plan. Actually getting out of the cell hadn’t crossed his mind until Wendy held out her keys, but he didn’t think blaming her was going to work. The police knew where he was, and in a couple of minutes they would be able to make a shrewd guess at where he was going, but by then it would be too late. All his access codes were false, and he didn’t think anyone would be able to cancel them in time to stop him getting into the Facility. Quite what he was going to do when he was inside, he didn’t know yet.
He went through a couple more fences, across a couple more fields, then out onto another farm road. The road came out onto the main road half a mile from the Facility, and a minute or so later he was pulling up at the front gate.
The guard looked at the car, which was covered in dust and bits of chewed up vegetation, then at Alex, who was sweaty and red-faced and breathing hard, but the ID on the phone checked out and he stepped aside and waved the visitor through.
Alex parked outside the main building and pushed through the front doors. Charles was on the front desk. He smiled at first, when he saw Alex enter the foyer, but the smile faltered a little as Alex reached the desk and held his phone out to be identified.
“Have you seen Professor Day?” Alex asked.
Charles was frowning at the monitor on the desk. “I’m sorry, Mr Dolan, but this says you’re somebody else.”
“I know,” Alex said. “I’m going to get that fixed while I’m here. Where’s Professor Day?”
“But I can’t let you through,” Charles said, still reading. “It says here that your access has been revoked.”
“Where is
he?” Alex yelled.
Charles actually took a step back from the desk. He raised a finger and pointed at the ceiling. “Control room,” he said.
“Thank you,” Alex said, and he started to run up the stairs.
The control room was on the top floor, at the end of a long corridor. Its door had a security lock, but the sockpuppet ID let him through. The room beyond was large and full of people, either sitting typing at consoles and staring at monitors, or watching screens suspended from the ceiling. Nobody noticed him, but he spotted Delahaye on the other side of the room, deep in conversation with Brigadier General Bell, and perhaps a dozen other techs and scientists he recognised.
Rob Chen came over and shook hands. “Hey, man,” he said. “Come to see the main event?”
“What’s going on?” Alex asked, scanning the room.
“We’re going to run the thing at full power for the first time. Delahaye’s being a prick.”
“What’s new? Listen, is Larry here?”
“Yeah. I saw him earlier.” Rob looked around the room. “Over there.”
Alex looked, saw Larry Day’s leonine features over the heads of a group of people in a corner of the control room. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and a desert camouflage jacket and he was holding a tin of beer. His hair looked as if he had been dragged back and forth through a hedge a couple of times, and his eyes were hidden by mirrorshades with lenses the size of silver dollars.
“Okay,” said Alex. “Rob, do me a favour and go and get Security, please.”
“What?”
“Just do it, please. And hurry.”
Rob looked at him, then at Larry, then back to Alex. “What’s going on?”
“It’s a long story. Please, Rob.”
Rob came to a decision. “Okay.” And he turned for the door.
Alex pushed his way through the press of people. In the background, he heard a couple of voices raised in a countdown, and more voices joined them as he moved towards Larry. By the time he reached him, most of the room was happily counting down.
Larry turned his mirrored gaze towards him and beamed. “Alex,” he said.
He had absolutely no idea what to do next. In the background, he heard the countdown continuing, then Delahaye’s voice raised over the noise shouting, “What the fuck is he doing here?”
Alex lunged forward, grabbed Larry by the front of the camouflage jacket, and drove him two steps back against the wall.
“…Three…two…” everyone counted.
“You fucking bastard!” Alex yelled into Larry’s face.
“…One…zero!” and the world filled with a sudden flash of something that was not blinding white light.
The Manifold
THERE WAS A place that was not a place. It was too small and too large all at once, and it was either dark or it was lit by something that wasn’t light at all but came in from the edge of vision like a hypnagogic nightmare. There was an ‘up’ and a ‘down’. Or maybe it was a ‘down’ and an ‘up’. He screamed and he screamed and the noises he made were not sounds. He was… He was…
He drifted, or perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps he remained still and everything else moved around him. Perhaps there was no everything else. Perhaps there was no him.
He went away, came back. Went away, came back. There was a howling… sound? Vibration? Light? He went away, came back. Time passed. Or perhaps time stood still and he passed. He was larger than the universe and small enough to hide within the electron shell of an atom.
Objects which were not objects at all boiled at the edges of his perception. He moved towards them, or perhaps he stayed still and they moved towards him. They were shapes that were not shapes, too small to see and too large to comprehend, shapes that curled away tightly into infinity. He couldn’t understand what he was seeing, couldn’t be sure he was seeing it at all. He wanted to lie down and die, and he did in fact try that a couple of times, but he found that he couldn’t even lie down, in the sense that he had once understood it. He held up his hands and looked at them. They were… They were…
He went away, came back.
He made a choice. If he was perceiving an environment, even though he couldn’t understand what he was perceiving, he must exist, in some form or other. The very fact that he was able to make the choice to believe that meant he must exist. That was a start. He existed. He was real. A wave of panic the size of the bow-shock from an exploding galaxy passed through him.
He went away, came back.
At some point, maybe instantly, maybe it took a hundred billion years, he encountered a… structure. It looked like… there was no way for him to understand what it looked like, but he touched it and he curled around it, and the next thing he knew he was lying on his back looking up at a starry sky and someone nearby was screaming, “Don’t move, you fucker! You stay right where you are!”
It was an effort to remember how to breathe; his chest hurt and his eyes hurt and he was freezing cold. By somehow not thinking about it, he managed to trick his body into remembering how to turn his head. A man in a military uniform was standing a short distance away, pointing an automatic rifle at him. There was no moon, no light at all—the soldier was wearing a bulky pair of image-amplifying goggles over his eyes—but he could see the soldier perfectly well.
“Who are you?” he asked, and almost choked himself because he was still trying to speak as he might have when he was there. He coughed and retched and felt a wave of tremors pass through his body. At some point, he realised he was stark naked. “Who are you?” he said again.
“Who are you?” shouted the soldier.
“Dolan,” he said, and this time he managed to say it without strangling. “Alex Dolan. There’s been some kind of accident.”
There was a squawking noise and the soldier lifted a walkie-talkie to his lips. “Fenwick here, sir,” he shouted into the radio. “I’ve got a civilian here. He says there’s been an accident.”
“IS HE AWAKE?” a voice said.
“I don’t know, sir,” answered another. “I can’t tell.”
“What do you mean, you can’t tell?”
“Sir, none of these readings make any sense.”
There was something wrong with his eyes. They were open, but the right was blind in the centre of his vision and was only perceiving blurred colours at the periphery. The left felt as if it was looking upward and to one side, but otherwise it wasn’t working at all. He tried to blink, but it was as if his body had forgotten how.
He was aware, though, of the room. It was not large and there was something not right about the walls. He could feel the mass of various pieces of equipment, and four people in the room with him. He only knew they were people because they were moving around and making noise; otherwise they were indistinguishable from the inanimate objects. He was afraid that he was paralysed, somehow. When he tried to wiggle his fingers and toes he felt them move, but they seemed to move somewhere else, not where he was. Some kind of brain injury? He remembered that momentary flash of blinding not-light which had seemed to last for ever, and he wondered if this was what a stroke was like.
He could not say to himself, with any great certainty, that he was breathing.
He lay there—he had a sense he was lying down—for some considerable time, listening to the other people in the room moving about and talking. Sometimes he could understand what they were saying, sometimes not. Sometimes it didn’t sound like speech. Or even like sound.
Strangely—and he noted it in a distant, almost uninterested way—he felt no sense of panic. He remembered panicking back there, a crashing wave of anxiety the size of a galaxy, but it seemed to have altered him, bent him into another shape somehow. He was paralysed and almost completely blind, and he was taking it in his stride, which was a surprise.
He slept—at least it felt like sleep—and dreamed he was back there, in that dimensionless space with too many dimensions, and when he woke again there was screaming in the room and people running abo
ut and things falling over and he wondered what that was so he concentrated and found himself back in his own body, more or less, and able to see, more or less.
He was lying on a hospital bed, one of those beds with rails on each side to stop people falling out. The head end of the bed was elevated slightly, so he could see around what seemed to be a perfectly ordinary hospital room. Perfectly ordinary apart from the way the walls didn’t seem to connect with each other, and the figure in doctor’s scrubs which lay on the floor near the door, whimpering. Everyone else seemed to have gone.
With an effort of will, he said, “What’s going on?” and the whimpering figure screamed and covered its ears and curled up in a ball.
Fuck this. He tried to sit up and discovered that one of his wrists was handcuffed to the bed rail. Except there was an optical illusion and if he looked at it in a certain way the bracelet didn’t seem to go around his wrist at all. He made a fist and rotated it and the handcuff seemed to miss his wrist altogether and fell on the bed.
He clambered down from the bed and stood unsteadily beside it, feeling the cold floor under his bare feet. “Hello?” he said to the figure on the floor—was it male, or female? He didn’t seem able to tell. “Are you okay?” There was no answer. He took a wobbly step away from the bed, then another, then another, and then all of a sudden he was right up against the door without remembering the intervening space. He tried the handle, but it was locked.
Okay. Well. He went back to the person on the floor and squatted down beside them. “Hello?” he said. “Do you need help? Can I call someone?” The only response was a hysterical high-pitched sob.
He stood up again and looked around the room. There were signs of panic here. Bits of medical equipment, monitors, instruments, strewn around the floor, stuff knocked over. What the fuck was he doing here? Where was here? Why had they handcuffed him, however sloppily, to the bed? Who were they?
He moved along one wall until he reached one of those troublesome corners. Here, there seemed to be a space wide enough for him to slip through, so he did, and found himself standing in the corridor outside the room. It ran off left and right, lined with doors, some of them open. He leaned round one and saw another hospital room, like the one he had just left. But this place didn’t feel remotely like a hospital. It had the dead dullness of an office building, and that was before you got to the way none of the walls connected with each other. Some kind of film set? How did that make any sense?
The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man Page 22