Those That Wake

by Jesse Karp

  The road blurred before Laura, as she found new tears from a place she had thought was all dried up.

  The twinkling lights of a town came into view in the distance.

  Laura should have been exhausted, but her eyes were wide with her recent realizations. She was ready to keep going now, even without Remak. It occurred to her, for no reason she could form coherently, that maybe it served them in some way to be without Remak and his precise command of every situation. And she thought of her parents, who had given her something they no longer possessed, this sense of strength that had saved her. Was this how it was supposed to be? Were parents supposed to slowly fade away, bequeathing the best of themselves to their children?

  She was ready to keep going. But to where?

  "What happens now?" Mike said from the back, seeing the lights of the town approaching and beating her to the question. "We take a train into Canada, climb into the mountains, and disappear forever?"

  "That's not what you really want, Mike," Laura told him flat.

  "Like hell it isn't."

  "No." Mal's voice was hard and final, not unlike it had been right before he had ordered Mike into the corner and lit into the invaders. "We go back to the building, the one with the doors. Whatever's making this happen, that's where it is."

  "That is utter genius," Mike said. "You want us to go there without Remak? And when we find whatever we find in the building? Then what do we do?"

  Mal's voice was as heavy as a stone when he said it.

  "Fight."

  PART 3

  THE GUARDIAN WAITS

  THERE," MAL SAID, pointing unnecessarily—he thought—across the street.

  Mike squinted.

  "Which one?" Laura said. "With the two women smoking in front or the one with all the plants?"

  Mal's finger wavered as though it were the defective aspect of this scenario.

  "In between them," he said, studying the other two, bringing his finger back up more certainly. "Right there."

  Laura blinked, and then her back went straight and she blinked again. Mike was staring.

  "Oh," Laura said slowly. "That one. That's weird. It's like I forgot to look at it."

  Mal nodded and looked at the building and the crowds of people walking by it.

  "So," Mike said, and let it hang, waiting for someone else to bring the thought to fruition. When no one did, he asked, "Do we just walk in?"

  "That's what I did," Mal said.

  "And it went so well."

  "What else, then? Wait until someone comes out? I don't think"—Mal watched the building in silence for a moment—"anyone ever will."

  "What if it knows we're coming? What if it's waiting for us in there?"

  "Do you want to go in at night?"

  "Night? No way in hell."

  "We should go in now," Laura said. "If it knows we're coming, it's not going to un-know it by tomorrow. And we can't afford to wait for a week or a month. What difference would nighttime make, anyway? It doesn't sleep or go home for dinner. There won't be, like, less of it on duty. We need to go in now."

  Mal nodded and then Mike nodded, and they turned back to the building and waited for one of the others to take the first step across the street.

  Tentatively, Laura went first. She weaved between stopped cars, leading the other two at a short distance, until they came up on the opposite sidewalk and stood before the cold, metallic tower.

  "You made it," someone said from behind. They turned as one, Mal moving between the other two and the speaker.

  "I wasn't sure you would," Remak said, and Laura instinctively lurched forward and threw her arms around him. He hugged her back mechanically, and when she let go and looked into his face, for just an instant—maybe it was a projection of her own fear—Laura thought he wasn't pleased to see them.

  "When the house went up," Mal said, "we thought..."

  "No." Remak didn't go beyond that. He looked away from them and at the building. "I've been looking for this place for hours. I remembered where Mal said it was, but I walked up and down the block and couldn't find it."

  "But you see it now," Mal said.

  "When you walked up to it." Remak nodded. "I feel as though I just remembered to see it," he added curiously. "It's not just me, either. I've been sitting in the restaurant across the street. No one else sees it, either. Not a single person glanced up to look at their reflection in the door or stopped to take a smoke in front. It's like it's not even here."

  "They'd see it if you showed it to them," Mal said.

  "Maybe," Remak said. "But even we had a hard time seeing it, and we haven't been gotten to yet. I assume Laura explained what it is we're facing."

  "Should we be doing this out here?" Mike asked, the building looming right behind him.

  "Why not?" Remak said. "Do you think it doesn't know we're coming? Do you think it doesn't know we're here? It's in half the people around us, like a disease, an infectious disease of the brain."

  "Not the brain," Laura cut in. "The mind. I mean, that's what the Librarian was saying, more or less, wasn't it?"

  "There is no mind without the brain," Remak said. "Nothing affects one without affecting the other."

  "But the brain is physical; the mind is intangible," Laura said. "A disease, like Alzheimer's or something, affects the brain physically. Are you saying that's what this thing does?"

  "Probably not."

  "Then this thing is really more like a ghost than a disease. It haunts the mind as much as it infects it." Laura didn't bother to camouflage the challenge in her tone any longer.

  "If you like," Remak allowed. "The point is, for whatever reason, the four of us are clear, for the time being. We can do something about it."

  "The last time I tried to go up, something big and very, very strong stopped me," Mal said.

  "I have an idea about that," Remak said.

  "Me, too," Laura said.

  "Oh?" His scientist's eyes studied her, and a moment of tension stretched between them.

  "This is what we were thinking." Mal broke into the uncomfortable moment and explained.

  Remak examined the plan for flaws with the care of a jeweler. When he found one, he offered modifications and when all of them were satisfied, they went over the plan again without embellishment.

  Once they were all clear on their parts, Mal stepped in front and led them through the glass and metal door into what now felt to him like another place altogether. Not a different world or a different time, but a different way of thinking, where you couldn't count on any of the laws and truths you knew.

  It was the same as Mal remembered it: dank, gray, somehow unfinished, and uncomfortably pregnant with imminent menace. The others looked about them, at the exposed concrete of the floor, the dulled metal of the walls, the polished chrome here and there, the vastness of the place.

  "There are the elevators." Mal pointed at the concrete columnlike banks before them. "On the other side is an open space, like a lounge or something."

  Remak led them past the elevators and had a look at the emptiness beyond. He nodded at the space where there could be an internal garden or a fountain or some giant corporate insignia in sculpture. It was a space designed to strip away imagination and hope and replace them with a homogenous inertia so that individuality could die. And worse yet, it was that space in blank, generic form, making it all the easier to see how content, any content, any corporate symbol or ideology—which was to say, all corporate symbols or ideology—could be slipped in.

  He stared, looking hypnotized at the panorama for a moment, until Mal stirred him with a hand on his shoulder. Mike and Laura took their places, and Mal and Remak positioned themselves at the elevator. Remak slipped the gun out and held it loosely at his side, then nodded to Mal.

  Mal went over and faced the row of elevators he had used, or tried to use, on previous visits. Just before his finger reached the button, it lit a dull orange, as if it sensed his presence. He took a step back and wa
ited.

  Remak loosened his shoulder, planted his feet.

  The elevator in the middle dinged. Mal's hands flexed quickly at his sides. The door slid open slowly. He braced himself.

  There was an empty elevator before him, waiting for him to board it. He glanced over at Remak and back quickly, expecting something invisible within it to suddenly appear and attack as soon as he looked away.

  Remak made no move, no response, but merely waited.

  Mal poked his head into the compartment, looked on both sides, pulled his head out. He looked at Remak again, shrugged, and started to step in.

  His foot had barely come off the floor when a dark motion darted from the elevator opposite, at his back. That door had opened swiftly and had not dinged.

  All Remak could see of the motion was dark and big and fast. It had Mal before the gun had even twitched.

  Mal was in the air, his feet kicking, his hands reaching back over his shoulders to find what had him. Now still, the motion became a figure, of a sort; indistinct, not quite solid, but definitely there, like something seen through a rain-slicked window.

  The gun was up. The head of the figure was either hooded or just very dark. Remak shifted to his right just enough to find the front center of the hood or the darkness.

  Mal felt the force against his neck, straining it, his tendons reaching their snapping point.

  The line of fire between the gun and the figure's face came perilously close to Mal's head. It wasn't just aim that was critical, it was timing, because Mal was flailing and his head kept interfering with the shot. There was a chance the bullet would catch Mal square in the temple, perhaps sparing him the shock and pain of a snapped neck.

  Remak fired a single, crackling hiss that reverberated metallically up and down the empty space. It found the center of that darkness, and the figure jolted.

  The figure didn't pause to consider or calculate. It tossed Mal thoughtlessly away, sending him sprawling out across the rough concrete on the floor behind him, and then it became a motion again.

  Remak was already moving from a standstill to a dead sprint, pumping his arms and cutting the distance to the front door with all his might.

  There was Laura at the door. She saw Remak and the motion behind him, an indistinct blur that made her stomach flutter. What she felt wasn't just fear but a particular kind of fear, without reason or hope: that of a child caught before a speeding car with nowhere to escape. She closed her eyes, turned her head away, and pulled the door open.

  Remak watched as the door opened to the world they had come from, the people passing by and not looking at them. It was something like a nightmare in which you were close enough to freedom that if you extended your fingers you could touch it while seeing all the people who couldn't help you.

  Two feet from the border between here and there, Remak's feet were pulled off the ground. It wouldn't be more than a second before he was dead, either from a splintered spine or from something done to him that would take his mind from him forever.

  Mal, also at a dead run, the motion sending jolts up his injured leg, launched himself like a stone from a catapult. He vaulted into the figure's back, and for an instant, just an instant, it felt like a wall made of rock or steel. He knew it would break his bones—until the instant his momentum had carried him, the figure, and Remak through the doorway and outside. Then suddenly Mal was slamming into nothing at all. The figure was gone, and he and Remak tumbled over each other as, for the second time in about eight seconds, Mal scraped his bare arms bloody against concrete.

  They looked up at each other, both a little stunned. People saw them, there on the sidewalk. A few stopped dead and stared at them. A woman came a little closer and asked suspiciously if they were all right.

  "Great, thanks," Mal said, rising agonizingly from the ground. Remak helped him to his feet. Mal examined his skinned flesh, blood welling slowly in places. He brushed his chest and torso off and followed Remak back inside the building.

  The bystanders watched the two men turn and walk into...

  The people hurried along their way, the incident already murky and vague in their minds.

  Mike waited, his foot jammed into the elevator door to keep it from closing. As Mal, Remak, and Laura appeared, he watched the other elevators uncertainly, expecting something else to come bursting out at any time.

  They piled into the elevator, and the door closed.

  Remak stuffed the revolver back into the holster and looked up at the buttons. His mouth was open, to ask Mal again which floors he'd been to, but froze in that position, silenced. It was quite clear which button mattered. The top floor, the button by itself, crowning the double rows beneath it, was unmarked. Just looking at it made their stomachs weak, dried their throats.

  The four stared at the button and were still.

  MAN IN SUIT

  THE BUTTON STARED back at them. It challenged them like an eye staring directly at their fears, at the things in their lives that they buried away and never even looked at themselves.

  Laura held Mal's hand. Hers was fully a quarter smaller, but he could still feel it crushing, compressing his bones and tendons with the strength of fear, the same fear that held him numb and shaking. The force must be practically breaking her delicate fingers; he could only imagine what it was doing to the rest of her. Why didn't she look away?

  Then he saw why. Her other hand was rising toward the button, moving slowly as if it were dragging a great weight under it. Mal looked at Remak. His fear was a quizzical thing, his head tilted at the button, trying to figure it out. Mal looked at Mike, and Mike was looking down, shaking his head.

  Laura's hand rose.

  And Mal's hand came up, too. He would not make her do it alone. Her above all.

  Their hands were up, their fingers extended, the button before them, its only true weapon what they carried in their own heads. And when he felt her squeeze his other hand, when he knew it was time to close his eyes and lurch forward, when they had decided but before they could move, the button glowed hazy orange all by itself and the elevator hummed smoothly around them.

  Their arms fell back to their sides, the muscles aching and twitching. Now there was also the feeling that there wasn't enough air. Mal felt a trembling first in his stomach, and then he could see it in his hands. Someone was crying, and he looked up, expecting it to be Laura, but it was Mike, gripping his face, still shaking his head. Laura was making fists, pressing them into her legs, making an effort at steadying her breath. He could see muscles in her throat clenching. Remak's eyes were closed, and he breathed deeply and steadily, mechanically, forcing his body to obey.

  There was a loud sob of fear, and Laura clutched Mike to her. They embraced and shook so hard, Mal could practically feel it from where he was. Mal reached around and hugged them both, as though to protect them, but really to protect himself. He reached one of his powerful, bloodied arms out and grasped Remak, and pulled him to them as well.

  Remak opened his eyes and let out a wail that they all knew from their own hearts.

  And the door opened.

  Remak was the first to pull away from the embrace; he straightened his back and turned around to face the door. The others, hearing nothing from him, came apart from one another slowly, rubbing tears from their faces and following his gaze out the door.

  There, in an office, was a man in a suit.

  And truly, it was a man in a suit. All you could say of the suit was that it was a suit—cloth cut into a recognizable shape, that shape being "suit." It had no particular color, no particular style. It was much more the idea "suit" than it was actually a suit itself.

  So, too, was the man. Even when you were looking straight at him, it was impossible to describe him. He wasn't old, young, tall, short, thin, fat, dark, light, handsome, ugly. Like the suit, he was just a familiar shape that served a universal purpose, to move and, perhaps, to speak.

  The office, unlike the space downstairs, had no exposed surface
s of plaster or masonry or drywall. But it, too, was a blank form onto which any style could be placed. It was "office" and nothing more or less than that.

  The shape of the man looked at them in the elevator. They knew he did because things they recognized as eyes were directed at them, not because there was any indication of acknowledgment or impatience or humor or pity in his face, because there was no expression there at all. How could there be when there was no true face for those expressions to play upon?

  Remak, standing straight, not wiping at the dampness on his cheeks, stepped out first. The others followed him, their fear, at least the unreasoning fear that had built and built, gone now. Remak opened his mouth to speak, but Mal was suddenly alongside him, moving as if he were stepping into a ring.

  "What are you?" Mal said.

  "What are you?" Man in Suit said. "You ask me to justify my being. What is your defense for your own?"

  "We are the evolved and evolving species homo sapiens," Remak countered, "unique and unprecedented. You are only a genus of a species, just another form of meme."

  "No. I move myself, sustain myself, communicate, thrive in a unique way," Man in Suit said. "I am Idea. The others are only notion. They are my prehistory, I am their future. And yours."

  The voice, the familiar voice he had heard in the lobby days ago ... Mal finally recognized it—i ts tones, its dips and rises, its emphasis, both warmly human and distinctly artificial. It was the voice Mal heard in his head when he saw a commercial on the HD, offering him a deal, or words scrolling by on his cell, advertising exciting benefits. It was the voice that offered him happiness if he would drink the latest sports drink and perfect health through the latest pharmaceutical, that told him about the newest car that would make him a success and the guaranteed diet that would make him attractive. It was the voice of empty promise that encompassed, that inundated, that drowned human life. And looking at it now, Mal decided, this was the only face it could have.