“Can you describe it?” asked Wendy’s voice in his earpiece.
“No, I can’t even see… wait.” The grass had started to twitch, then vibrate, as if whatever was in there was shaking itself violently. “Oh.” Abruptly, something small and possibly bipedal stood and looked at him, and just as suddenly dropped out of sight again sped off through the grass. “Did you get that?”
“Affirmative,” she said. “That was… weird.”
“That wasn’t a raccoon, was it? It had too many eyes.”
There was a moment’s silence over the commlink, then Professor Sierpińska’s voice said, “Do you feel under threat, Alex?”
“Sure,” he said. “Every day since the accident.”
Another brief silence, then the Professor said, “Proceed with caution, please. And don’t forget to describe what you see.”
He reached the front of the building and gave them a long tracking shot with the cameras. “It looks the same as it did when I came back here,” he said. “Some windows are broken, it needs a lick of paint, but the structure looks sound. One of the doors is open. I’m going to go in.”
Inside, the lobby was ankle-deep in blown-in leaves and bits of vegetation. He smelled mould and animals. He reached up onto the top of his head and switched on the lamp, turned in a slow circle. “No obvious damage,” he said. “No sign of people, no sign that anyone’s been in here since the accident.” He looked at the floor, where two narrow lines had been scuffed in the leaf litter. “I can see the tracks of your remote; they haven’t been disturbed. Is there anything here you want a closer look at?”
“No, thank you,” said Professor Sierpińska. “Carry on, please.”
“Okay. I’m going up the stairs now.” He passed a panel of light switches, flipped them up and down one at a time. “Power’s out,” he said.
“The circuit breakers are in the basement,” said Wendy. “We’ll leave them for another time.”
“You sound awfully sure there’s going to be another time. Going up the stairs now.”
He took the stairs carefully, pausing on each landing, until he reached the top floor and shone his light down the corridor. “Looks deserted,” he said. “Animals have been in here; I can see pawprints on the carpet.” He bent down to give the cameras a good look at a clutter of old bones and feathers at the base of the wall. “Someone’s dinner,” he said. He straightened up. “I’m going down the corridor.”
He tried the doors on either side as he went. About half of them were locked. He stood in the doorways of the others and shot a minute or so of footage before carrying on.
The door at the end was open. He looked inside, remembering the control room as it had been when he’d last seen it, full of people. Now it was dark and empty and cold and it smelled very strongly of animal piss. He shone the light on the desks and workstations and screens. “Nobody home,” he said. “No sign of bodies.” He paused and looked at a mug on one of the desks. It was half full of mould. He moved slowly between the desks, filming everything, making sure he kept well away from the thing in the middle of the room until he was ready to turn and look at it.
“There’s nothing there,” he said.
“Could you be more precise, please?” asked the Professor.
So there it was, Point Zero itself, the thing which would not be imaged. Or rather, there it wasn’t. “It’s like a blind spot,” he said. “You’re conscious something’s there, but you can’t see it. It’s hard to tell how big it is, precisely. Maybe a couple of metres across. I couldn’t tell you what shape it is; I’m getting an impression it might be spherical, but it’s only an impression. It doesn’t seem to be doing anything, just sitting there.”
“Sitting, or floating?”
“I can’t tell. It seems closer to the floor than the ceiling, that’s all I can make out.”
“We’re not reading any kind of activity in there at all,” said the Professor. “No radiation. Nothing.”
“That’s because there’s nothing here,” Alex told her, moving around Point Zero. “I don’t know how to describe it.”
A sigh. “Very well. Give us another five minutes of footage, then move on to the next phase, please.”
The next phase had been very hotly discussed back at Quantico. He said, “You’re really sure you want me to do that?”
“I’m sorry, Alex,” she told him. “We have to know.”
“Okay. Well, it’s been good working with you.”
“We’ll see you soon,” she said.
“Right.”
He took off his gear and put it on the floor by the door, where a bomb disposal robot could retrieve it if necessary. He balanced the helmet on a filing cabinet, where the cameras had a good view of the room. Then he walked over to Point Zero. “I’m standing right next to it,” he told them. “I don’t feel anything.”
“Copy that,” said the Professor. “Good luck, Alex.”
“If I had any good luck at all I wouldn’t be here in the first place,” he said, and he stepped forward into Point Zero…
…AND OUT INTO familiar howling notlight. Ah well. Home again home again. The theory was right; Point Zero was the point where the dimensions touched, a hole between the real world and the Manifold. Looking behind him, he saw that it existed here as a faint craquelure hanging in the air. He made a mental note of its position and moved on.
He came upon the structures again, the ones the Professor was theorising represented everyone from the control room. She thought they were caught in some kind of intermediate state, neither dead nor alive. He counted them, as best he could. There had been thirty people in the control room when the accident happened. Minus himself and the still-theoretical second survivor, that left twenty-eight. But he counted twenty-nine. Did that mean they were wrong about the djinn? That it was just some natural phenomenon after all? He didn’t think so. There were too many bodies here.
He drifted for a while. The team back at the SCS had no idea how long this would take him—there had been a real possibility that it would kill him outright—so he had some spare time. He took a very short step.
And found himself standing on East Walden Lane. All the houses looked dilapidated and deserted, their gardens gone wild. But there was a light on in one house, so he walked up the path onto the porch and knocked on the door, and after a minute or so Ralph opened it. “You’re dead,” he said.
“I get that a lot, these days.”
Ralph grunted. “Come on in, then.”
The house was a mess. It looked as if Ralph had abandoned the upper floor and was living and sleeping downstairs. He’d lost a lot of weight and moved very slowly, as if he ached all over.
“Why aren’t you dead?” he asked as they sat down in the living room.
“I wasn’t there,” said Alex.
“They said you were.”
“They were wrong. What are you still doing here? I heard they evacuated the town.”
“Where am I going to go?”
“Danny would have helped you.”
Ralph said, “Danny,” and made a rude noise. “He beat feet the first chance he got.”
Alex suspected this was untrue. He pictured Danny standing on Ralph’s porch, and Ralph telling him in no uncertain terms to fuck off. “You can’t stay here, you stupid old man,” he said. “How the hell are you managing?”
“We got militia here now,” Ralph said. “Montana militia. Survivalists looking for the End of Days. Moved into town a couple of weeks after the accident. They had a standoff with the Army, then the Army decided to leave them be, so now they just growl at each other every now and again. They bring me food and water, make sure I’m okay. They’re batshit crazy, of course, but they look after me.”
Homer wandered into the room. He’d lost weight too, but his digestion hadn’t improved. He farted in greeting, then left again. Alex said, “Ralph, seriously, you have to leave. Look at the state of you.”
Ralph shook his head. “This is my home,
Alex. I don’t understand why apparently smart people can’t understand that.”
Alex looked at the old man. In his right lung, shining a steady blue like the light over the front door of an old police station, was a tumour the size of a tangerine. It had thrown off a bunch of secondaries, and they twinkled in his other lung and his lymphatic system and his liver and spleen. Alex sighed and snuffed out the lights one by one. Then he repaired the worn-out mitral valve in Ralph’s heart and cleaned out his arthritis, and finally he reset his telomeres. And then, because why not, he did the same thing to Homer.
This all took a fraction of a second, and Ralph never felt a thing. He put his hand in his pocket and brought out a fat envelope. “There’s ten thousand dollars here,” he said. He wasn’t sure whether it was exactly ten thousand, but that was what he had imagined.
Ralph eyed the envelope as if Alex had decided to offer him a rattlesnake. “Where did you get that?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But there’s more where it came from. Take it, get your act together, take Homer, and get out of here.” He didn’t know how many more years he’d given the old man and his dog, but eventually someone would notice that Ralph hadn’t died of old age, was in fact starting to look positively chipper, and that would attract the attention of Flynn and his friends. “The militia guys must know a way through the quarantine; get them to take you out, get on a bus, and just go. I’ll call you and we’ll sort things out from there.”
There must have been something in his voice, this time, because Ralph gave him a long, steady look. Then he reached out and took the envelope. “That guy who came to see you,” he said. “The big guy with the red car.”
“Larry?”
Ralph nodded. “They say he killed some folks. Is that true?”
Alex stared at him. “I have no idea. What are you talking about?”
“He died in the explosion, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, when they finally got round to checking out his house they found some bodies there. That’s what I hear.”
Alex thought about it, then shook his head. “That’s ridiculous. Who told you that?”
“Bud Rosewater. He was pissed because he was trying to deal with that while the emergency was going on. Said it was a big guy with white hair, drove a red car. Asked if I’d seen him around.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Said he’d been round here one day but you weren’t home. Said I thought the guy worked at the Facility, maybe he was here to do an interview with you or something.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Alex said again.
“Well, that’s what he told me.” Ralph regarded him calmly. “You got time for a game?”
“No. I have to be somewhere else.” He felt as if the world had suddenly taken a ninety-degree turn. Another ninety-degree turn. He stood up. “Two days,” he said, nodding at the envelope in Ralph’s hand. “I’ll call you in two days, and if you’re not somewhere else by then I’ll get you out of here myself, and I promise you won’t enjoy that.”
Ralph tipped his head to one side. “You’re different.”
“You have no idea. I’ll be in touch, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And take Homer with you.”
Ralph snorted. “Where the hell do you think I’m going to leave him?”
HE WENT BACK to the SCS via the Manifold, stepped out into the control room and picked up the bicycle helmet. “Hi, honey. I’m home,” he said for the benefit of the cameras.
Back outside the fence, Professor Sierpińska said, “You were gone a while. We were worried.”
“You were right,” he told her, taking off his rucksack and handing it to one of the techs. “It’s the front door into the Manifold.”
She nodded happily. “That’s good news. But what were you doing in there for so long?”
“Time doesn’t work like that over there, I keep telling you that. But I did a count of the things you think are Professor Delahaye and his team and there’s one too many.” He saw Flynn and Dom, standing behind the Professor, exchange a glance. “So,” he went on. “What are you not telling me?”
“WE DON’T KNOW this for an absolute fact,” Flynn said. “There’s no evidence, no eye-witness testimony.”
“Okay,” said Alex. They were sitting in a small room in one of the office modules that made up Camp Batavia, just himself and Flynn at a cheap table. There was an irritating whine in the background, almost too high-pitched for human hearing. Alex presumed it was electronic bafflers to prevent eavesdropping, but equally it could be a mosquito caught in ducting behind the wall.
Flynn said, “It’s being kept very quiet, but nobody’s seen Stanisław Clayton since the accident. We know he was in Sioux Crossing because he was having a meeting with someone at the New Rose Hotel. Where he went after that, we don’t know. None of his people know.”
Alex remembered Wendy saying something about Stan going missing.
“We think it’s possible that he went to the Facility when he heard about the accident,” Flynn went on. “Again, nobody we’ve spoken with remembers seeing him there, but by all accounts it was chaos in the first few hours and days after the incident. It’s possible he could have gone into the control room and got too close to Point Zero, either accidentally or on purpose.”
Alex sat back on his uncomfortable chair. “Well, shit,” he said.
“Obviously, the board of Clayton Dynamics doesn’t want this becoming common knowledge. Their share price is already in the toilet after the accident. It’s equally not beyond the realms of possibility that when he heard about the accident he took himself off to a quiet corner of Rosewater County and killed himself.”
Alex shook his head. “Stan wouldn’t kill himself. He’s not the type.”
Flynn looked at him sadly. “There’s no ‘type’ when it comes to suicide, Alex. But if you’re right, it seems more likely he wound up in the Manifold, and I’ll pass that on to the board in due course.”
“You should have told me about this right away,” Alex said.
“Why? What possible good could it have done you to know about it?”
“It would have demonstrated a certain amount of trust.”
“It would, and I apologise,” Flynn said. “But while we’re on the subject of trust, you didn’t spend all that time in the Manifold counting heads, did you. You were over the other side of town chatting with your old neighbour.”
Alex gave him a hard stare. “Ralph’s house is bugged.”
“Ralph’s house is bugged,” Flynn agreed. “He’s been dealing with the preppers who moved into Rosewater County; we thought we might pick up some useful gossip. And so we did.”
They stared at each other for quite a while. Alex said, “Larry Day.”
“I’m not going to apologise for that,” Flynn said.
“Good.”
“I wanted you clear-headed and cooperative, not obsessing about Professor Day.” Flynn knew everything, of course. Kitson, the raccoon, the fire, Larry. Alex had told him all that in the earliest days of his debriefing.
“Is it true?”
“Professor Day had a house over on the west side of Rosewater County, near the county line. Quite a secluded place. It took the County Sheriff’s department a couple of weeks to work around to visiting it; the authorities here were extremely busy in the early days of the emergency. Professor Day lived alone, so they broke in, and they found human remains. I’m not going to tell you the circumstances in which they found them, but it was more than one person.”
Alex blinked at him.
“We still don’t know who they were or how they met their deaths,” Flynn went on. “As to why, well, we’re still working on that. One of the profilers at Quantico assembled a view of him from sources in the public domain, which is probably the worst way of doing it, but it’s not pretty. Equally, he could have suffered some form of breakdown.”
“A breakdown that made hi
m kill people?”
Flynn drummed his fingers on the tabletop for a moment. “One of the profilers at Quantico thinks he became fixated on you when you were arrested in Blackfish County. I understand you were released first?”
Alex nodded mutely.
“Well, they think that offended him somehow and he decided you were next. We still don’t know what the Englishman was doing in Rosewater County, or how he wound up in your car, but it looks like Day mistook him for you and drove him off the road.”
It took Alex a long time to even begin to process this. “Well,” he said, “this has been a hell of a day.”
“Everyone’s tired,” Flynn said, standing up. “Have a bite to eat, then get some sleep. We’ve got to do it all again tomorrow.”
“What about Ralph?”
“Your friend?” Flynn paused at the door. “He can go; we’ve been trying to get the old fart to leave ever since the accident.” He gave a tired smile. “But next time you decide to counterfeit US currency, don’t tell people about it where you can be overheard, okay?”
OVER THE NEXT five days, Alex made a dozen trips into the control room, bringing out laptops and hard drives and notebooks and anything else that looked as if it might have details about the experiment Delahaye and his team had been running on the day of the accident. When, at the end of that time, nothing awful had happened, Stetson and her people moved into the lobby of the building and cautiously started to search the offices on the lower floors.
Back at Quantico, Flynn disappeared into a fog bank of meetings, Professor Sierpińska and her people busied themselves analysing the data Alex had brought back from the control room, and Dom found himself embroiled in an old Enforcement operation he had once run which had suddenly become live again.
Which left Alex twiddling his thumbs, repeating exercises, and smiting targets on the range. The techs tried to keep him busy, but after two weeks of nothing much happening he was starting to get cabin fever. “I’m supposed to be a superhero,” he told one of the techs. “I can’t just sit about all day watching Netflix.” The tech gave him an understanding smile and then went off to do something else.
The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man Page 26