by Jesse Karp
"Come with me." Mike disentangled his shoulder from the man's grip, took his arm, and nearly propelled him toward the stairway.
Mr. Craig of History and Global Culture Three squinted through his glasses down into the basement. In his sixteen years on the faculty, he had never actually been down to the basement. There was plenty he'd never done here, including raising his hand at the wrong time in a faculty meeting or being noticed in any way. That, really, was the only way to survive as long as he had in a school like this.
Mike led him down into the basement, around the corner, and down the hall. Long before they reached the end, it was apparent that there was now only one door there: that of the maintenance closet. This didn't take Mike by surprise. On the contrary, it was exactly what he had expected.
He went over to the wall where the second door had been and touched it. Mr. Craig was looking at him.
"Everything okay?" he asked, glancing about himself with mild interest.
Mike shoved past him and went back to the stairs. Mr. Craig followed behind.
"Mike?" he said as Mike walked back into the lobby and toward the offices.
"Yes!" Mike snarled. "Everything's great."
He pushed into the administrative offices and found Manuel making work for himself, in back, standing on a ladder and dealing with light bulbs.
"Manuel," he said, coming to the foot of the ladder in what he hoped was a threatening manner.
"Yes, Mr. Boothe," Manuel singsonged in an effort to be as condescending as possible.
"Come down here, please."
Manuel took his time coming down.
"Where does that other door in the basement go?" Mike demanded. "The one right next to the maintenance closet?"
"What are you talking about? The only other doors down there are to the boiler room and the server room. They're nowhere near the closet."
"Good," Mike said, jutting his head forward as he did so, causing Manuel to flinch back. "Exactly what I wanted to hear." He fumed away, storming by the principal's office, its door slightly ajar.
Mike sat in his office amid the other boxes of textbooks, his head in his hands, staring down at the desk. There was a knock at the door, which Mike patently ignored.
"Mike." The principal's voice came from beyond, and then the door opened. Mike looked up. Principal Tate, as primped and tidy as ever, was more a businesswoman than an educator. Just beyond her stood a man Mike didn't recognize.
"This is Jon Remak," the principal said, an unmistakably cautionary tone in her voice. "He's with the Mayor's Task Force on Education."
Remak nodded in greeting. He was athletic underneath his bland suit, in a short, compact way. His hair was short and spiky and black. His eyes were curious and intent on everything they looked at from beneath gold-rimmed glasses. His manner seemed to Mike too engaged to be involved in city-run education.
"Yes," Mike said, getting it together. "Hello."
"You were having some trouble in the basement?" Remak asked.
"No. No trouble whatsoever."
"You mentioned something to the gentleman working on the lights just outside Mrs. Tate's office."
"I have boxes of books to store there." Mike indicated the boxes that were making it difficult to navigate the office floor. "That's all."
"But you asked him about a door?"
The principal listened but clearly understood none of it, and was probably wondering, as Mike was, why the mayor's task force cared about doors in the basement.
"No"—Mike shook his head too quickly—"no door at all. What are you talking about?"
"I heard you ask the man in the office about a door."
"You heard wrong," Mike said.
"Mike," the principal interjected, "please." She stared at him as though she'd be pleased to stuff him through the window and send him plummeting to the cigarette-strewn alley behind the school.
"That's all right." Remak put his hand up. "We can leave Mr. Boothe be."
Tate nodded stiffly and, leaving Mike with a fleeting glare, escorted Remak out of the room.
On his way home, Mike was grabbed by two kids who swung him around and pushed him up against a brick wall, obviously prepared to perpetrate bodily harm on him, until they realized he was a "mistah." They conferred quietly, eyeing him with detachment as he cooled his heels against the wall. Needless to say, there was always an MCT officer around whenever Mike was shouting at some asshole on the street, but now—
The boys let him go, though through all rational calculation Mike couldn't figure out why. Did they value an education that much?
Across the street, he stepped around the chalk outline of a woman who had flung herself from a roof in an extreme but eminently understandable gesture of cosmic disgust. Around the corner, he watched a sweating mother, one arm filled with groceries, slapping her child on the back of the head, expecting the smack to drive home the point that he should stop crying.
He walked through Queens, under the gray sky, within the grayer shadows of gray buildings, through a light haze of cold rain. Did it ever stop raining anymore? Was the sky coming apart? When the rain stopped, would there be nothing left above and would the vacuum of space suck the entire planet into oblivion? He should be so lucky.
Home was only blocks from the school, the goddamned place that was swallowing his life. Even so, there was ample space between the two for a taxi to nearly run him down. The driver, who had been driving and attending his cell at the same time, screeched to a stop just short of Mike's legs, then cursed at him for the trouble. A disheveled homeless man, unable to make an effort at coherent speech, got in Mike's path and wouldn't get out of it until Mike actually reached out and shoved him to the side.
Mike opened his front door and climbed the stairway, slowly and heavily, weighted down by so very, very much. On his landing he pulled out his keys, only to have the key ring separate and spill keys all over the filthy landing. He glared at them angrily, then gathered himself and managed to pick them up. He had meant to invest in a cellock long ago, but he found that the money for that kind of thing always wound up being spent on beer. He pulled the right key from his palm, opened his door, and stepped in, and there was the man from the Mayor's Task Force on Education, sitting in Mike's shitty little living room in the only good chair he had.
"Mr. Boothe, there's no need to panic," Remak said, holding his hands up, because Mike looked as if he were about to sincerely, wholeheartedly do just that.
"What are you doing in my house? How did you even get in?" Mike decided to play the anger card instead.
"That's complicated," Remak said, standing up. He was shorter than Mike but seemed as if he were taller. "Part of a bigger story."
Mike stood dumbly, caught between wanting to hear the story and wanting to punch this fucker in the face, go into his bedroom, and maybe hang himself with a belt.
"I got in here by showing your landlady my Department of Sanitation ID."
"Department of Sanitation? How the hell did that get you in here?"
"The Department of Sanitation is surprisingly powerful, actually. 'We've had several complaints of an unusual smell emanating from 7C,'" he said in a convincingly officious voice. "That kind of thing."
"So how do you get a job in both sanitation and education, anyway?"
Remak made a tight, humorless smile of surrender and motioned to the table.
"Maybe we could sit down. You look like you could use some coffee or something."
"Is this about the door in the basement?"
"I think so, yes."
Mike dropped his bag on the sofa, shucked his jacket, and yanked a beer from the refrigerator, making a point not to offer another one to his "guest." He sat down and stared out the window over Remak's shoulder. The only window in the place, it revealed a stretch of dirty city on the other side of it, but the only thing that ever really held your eye out there was that goddamned dome, even as far away as it was. Mike was sure that one day he would look out there a
nd find the dome growing bigger, until it swallowed the people, the buildings, everything.
"There are hot spots in any city," Remak said as Mike took his first swig of beer. "Places that experience higher instances of violent crime due to a number of sociological and demographic factors. Inner city neighborhoods like—"
"This one. I get the idea." Mike was one more long-winded sentence away from tossing this guy out and downing all the beers in his refrigerator.
"All right. There are other sorts of hot spots, too. We call them Down Zones. They're not subject to higher rates of violent crime per se, but to many other incidents of a generally nihilistic nature. Crime, sometimes, but also suicide attempts and traffic accidents. Businesses in the area fail more often, and people who work in these areas are prone to cycles of depression. Areas with underfunded hospitals would be an example of Down Zones. Neighborhoods around poorly maintained cemeteries would be another, or inner city schools with a generally apathetic student body."
"Sounds familiar. What do you care?"
"I work for a group that studies these places, these Down Zones."
"Why?"
"We believe that their existence is indicative of a larger phenomenon."
"And that would be?" Mike had finished his first beer very quickly and plunked it down hard on his table.
"It's elusive." Remak seemed displeased to have to admit it. "It's a web of so many interconnected factors that it can be difficult for a layman to grasp. These factors are part of a larger theory of social interaction called the Global Dynamic. The Global Dynamic can predict human behavior by—"
"This is thrilling."
"All right." Remak did not seem chided, but he did move on. "The neighborhood around your school played host to twelve suicide attempts, sixteen traffic accidents, fourteen reported acts of random violence, and thirty-one domestic disturbances in the last two days."
"It's a crappy neighborhood."
"It is a crappy neighborhood," Remak said. "That's why we were watching it in the first place. But those statistics are more than double the number of such reports compiled for that neighborhood over any given two-week period in the last twenty-seven years. This is categorically unprecedented within the Global Dynamic rubric."
"So the world is going to hell."
"You're a difficult man to talk to," Remak said. "Are you always like this?"
"What's this got to do with the basement door?"
"Exactly."
Mike looked around the room for something more.
"Exactly what?" He threw his hands up.
"Over the last two days, something happened. Something opened up and poured out more apathy, more hopelessness, more despair, more amoral hatred than your neighborhood has seen in twenty-seven years. Whatever it was, frankly, seems to have affected you as well, though that's hardly any wonder."
"What the hell do you mean by that?"
"Well, you work right in the most hopeless, apathetic place in the entire neighborhood."
"Mm-hmm."
"I came to study the issue," Remak said. "Your comment about the door was the only thing out of the ordinary I saw or heard all day."
"There is no door."
"You said—"
"I know what I said. But there isn't a door there. You can go down and have a look for yourself."
"I did, actually, and I couldn't find the door. I need you to bring me back to it."
"Me? No. I was thinking about quitting just so I wouldn't have to go back in that building. You think I'm going to march right back down into the basement? Look. There was a door, and when I went back, there wasn't any door. That's what I've been trying to tell you." Mike leaned against the table, closer to Remak. "There. Isn't. Any. Door."
"No one else knew what you were talking about, so no one else has ever opened it. But you did. For some reason or other, it opened for you once. It may again."
Mike stared at the wall.
"Whatever is on the other side of it," Remak said, "may answer a lot of questions. It could be that—"
"Fine. Let's go."
Remak's intent eyes went dubious.
"You say you need me and only me," Mike explained. "You say this is all about why things suck. Fine. Let's go."
"Let's," Remak said.
Lights were on in the school halls. They stayed on all night, every weekday, weekend, holiday, and snow day. Even during the summer recess, lights stayed on in these halls. It gave the impression of occupancy, supposedly making potential burglars and vandals—and there were many of these, quite a few among the student body itself—less anxious to ply their so-called trades.
However, for much the same reason, the doors were locked. This didn't stop Remak, though. His cell somehow possessed the cellock codes, and he ushered Mike quietly in.
Mike didn't care for the way the school felt just now. It was never his favorite place, never filled him with optimism or pride, but now, with lights on but the halls empty, it vibrated with the disembodied bad will of all who had treaded its tiled floors, infected by their apathy.
The door to the basement was also locked, but Remak's cell had the code for that, too. When Remak pulled the handle, though, it came off in his hand. He turned to Mike as though he might have some explanation, which in fact he did.
"This place is crap."
Remak nodded, having gotten more or less the reply he expected. He put the knob on the floor and pushed the door open. They stepped through, flicking on the inadequate lighting, which served to do little more than highlight exactly how dark the basement actually was. Remak did not lock this door behind him, but he did step in front of Mike. That relieved Mike, because this was Remak's show and Mike would just as soon let this assclown take whatever spray of machine-gun lead, lash of hellfire, or blast of death ray they doubtless had coming. But it also annoyed Mike, because what was he, a little girl? This was his school's goddamned basement after all.
They walked down the dark, humid hall, stepped over the upturned box of books, and stopped short of the maintenance closet, directly in front of the rectangle of blank wall in question.
"Right here," Mike said, indicating nothing with a pointed finger. Remak looked at it and then back at him. "I came down, and there was a door. Gray with a shiny metal handle. It was a little bit open, so I pushed it. Like I told you on the way here, what was behind it I have no explanation for. Why it's not here, the same."
Remak was nodding and pressing his hand to the wall.
"Well," he said, stepping back and shrugging. "Try opening it again."
"Opening what?"
"Imagine there's a door there and try to open it."
Mike breathed out and shook his head, but stepped over, envisioned a door, the door actually, and—feeling very silly about it—mimed reaching out, turning a door handle, and pushing a door inward.
Naturally, nothing happened. Slit-eyed with annoyance, Mike turned to Remak and, over Remak's shoulder, saw with a start that the other end of the basement hall was filled with figures. They were silhouettes only, backlit by the dull light.
"Jesus freaking Christ," Mike said.
Not hesitating for an instant, Remak spun and saw the figures. He grabbed Mike's arm and pulled him back the way they had come. They turned the corner, and coming down the hallway toward them were more figures, clogging the passage.
Remak's hand went into his jacket and came out with a gun. The figures behind them were advancing now, too. Mike could make them out as they passed beneath a pale yellow pool of light. They were students, every one of them. But they were virtually silent, and they walked with a calm and a sense of community that none of these kids had ever experienced in their lives.
Remak also saw that they were students and pulled his gun away just as the figures were upon them. Remak put the first down with a chop to the neck and the second with a stomach strike. Behind him, Mike grunted and flailed. The figures made no noise at all.
One caught Remak across the jaw; a
nother grabbed an arm. His useless gun hit the floor. He threw one off and put stiff fingers into a solar plexus, then one had him by the head and others were going for his legs. He cracked one across the nose, chopped another's arm away as it reached for him.
Mike shouted, groaned, then stopped making any noise at all. The figures kept coming, washing over them like a silent, irresistible tidal wave, until Remak and Mike were swept away by darkness and into oblivion.
PART 2
THE MOUNTAIN
MAL OPENED HIS EYES and the first thing he saw was the last thing he was expecting: a tree. The limb, dry and lifeless, hung over him in the foreground of a flat, pale sky. He raised himself on his elbows and found himself merely one of an array of bodies littering the ground. Only one other person was awake, sitting with his hands planted on the ground, ready to push himself up, but still blinking the daze out of his eyes.
He was smaller than Mal, but compact, wiry-quick and whipcord strong, and beneath wire-rimmed glasses, his sharp eyes began collecting every detail. Just the sort of opponent Mal hated fighting. The man was wearing slacks and a sports jacket, torn in places.
"Remak," the man said to him. "Jon Remak."
"Mal." His voice came out rough, and he felt the tightness in his throat where the thing had grabbed him ... i f that had really happened and was not the figment of some nightmare imagination.
Remak extracted a cell from his pocket, examined it, and almost immediately put it away. Mal searched for his own and was surprised to find it. He was not surprised, though, to see the words "no signal" scrolling joylessly across the screen.
"Mal," Remak said, "do you know any of these other people?"
There were four others in a small enclosure of trees so thick on three sides as to be impenetrable. The trees opened up on one side to a cliff edge, and down beyond that, a flat granite plane, cracked and unwelcoming, spanning a long way across to another mountain, granite-gray, short, and squat.
The sky looked more like a ceiling, low and without depth or color, just a blank wash of dirty white. The trees around them gave a sense of greens and browns, but they were vague, muted, as if they had been put through the wash too many times. Even the short, prickling grass Mal was sitting on, growing out of hard, packed earth, felt stiff and brittle, more like twigs than plants. There was a disturbing stillness here. No breeze trickled through the dead branches or blades. There wasn't a single sound of life here, either—no birds, no crickets—just his own breathing and the rustle of Remak coming to his feet. The entire place communicated a sense of being used up, and filled him with unease.