by Peter Clines
He looked at Forrester. “But what?”
“Nothing.”
“I need to know anything you found.”
Forrester tapped her fingers against each other. “There’s not going to be any trouble about this, is there?”
“What do you mean, trouble?”
“I’m not going to get black-bagged for figuring out too much, am I?”
Mike blinked three times. “What?”
“You know. Black sack over the head. Whisked away in an unmarked van, never seen again.”
“You watch a lot of television, don’t you?”
“I just…” She shrugged. “This whole thing is a little weird, and then the DOD calls, and then you show up…”
“You’re safe,” Mike said. “Honest. Believe me, if I could get somebody black-bagged, there are four or five people who’d be on the list ahead of you.”
She exhaled and her shoulders relaxed.
“So what’d you find? What’s so weird?”
Forrester gestured at the scarred hand. “See that?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a burn.” She pointed at another scar near the elbow. “So is that. I’d guess maybe a year or so old. You can tell by the way they flatten out against the skin.”
“Okay.”
“This guy has a couple of old burns and a lot of cancer. One thing causes both of those.”
Mike felt his brows go up. “Radiation?” He looked at the body. “Those are radiation burns?”
“No such thing. Burns are burns. If you don’t know the cause, you can’t always pin it down from the wound itself, despite what you may have seen on television.” She shot a quick smirk at him. “Combined with all the cancer, though…I’d be willing to bet a few bucks on it.”
“How many?”
Her mouth twitched side to side. “Maybe fifty.”
“That sounds like a pretty confident bet.”
“I’d go higher, but there’s a bit of a conflict. Burns mean intense radioactive exposure for a very brief time. But cancer’s a result of long-term, low-level exposure.”
“How long term?”
“It’s not really something you can work backward to figure it out. It usually takes years for radiation cancers to manifest, but there are cases where it’s taken a lot less. My assumption was it was tied to everything else.”
He looked at Bob—at the body—again. “Everything else?”
“Well, look at him. He’s had the shit beat out of him a couple times over the past few months.”
“No,” said Mike. “That’s all…pretty recent.”
Forrester bit her lip. She shook her head. “This is all old damage.”
“It can’t be.”
She ran a finger along the body’s bubbly jaw line. “See this? That’s scar tissue. Old scar tissue. Again, I’d guess a year, at the most.”
He crouched and peered at the line of pale ripples in the skin. “You’re sure?”
“Yeah. And it’s a mess. Looks like half his face was ripped off and he didn’t get any stitches. I don’t even think it was taped. I’d say he just held it in place for a couple of hours until the blood clotted and it all healed by secondary intention.”
Mike frowned.
She pointed at his arm. “Same with this. That twist? That’s a broken humerus that wasn’t set. Well, wasn’t set right, anyway. Probably hurt like hell all the time.”
“Broken when?”
“A little over a year. Again, all consistent.”
Mike crossed his arms.
“Something wrong?”
“Very wrong. How old’s the puncture wound?”
“I’d say an hour before death.”
He frowned again. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. There was a lot of tissue damage, but it didn’t hit any major arteries, so that’s consistent with blood loss. A few inches higher, closer to the armpit, that’d be a different story.”
“Is there anything else you can tell me?”
“Two more things. They almost seem minor compared to everything else.”
“Shoot.”
“Secondary symptom,” she said, “most likely a contributing factor to his death, is dehydration.”
“Dehydration?”
Forrester nodded and touched the body’s face. “Look here, how chapped his lips are. Also notice the nostrils and the skin around the tear ducts. It was really obvious once I checked the vitreous fluid from his eyes.” She tapped Bob’s chest. “I’d say he’s been getting, at best, just under half a gallon of liquids a day for two or three weeks.”
“Not possible. He was a caffeine addict. He was always drinking something. Coffee, soda, energy drinks.”
“I never met the guy. I can only tell you what I found on the autopsy.” Mike rubbed his temples. The ants were swarming on both sides of his brain. They wanted out. He was tempted to let them go. “What was the other thing?”
“I checked stomach contents. It’s a standard thing. His had some raw meat, dirt, and just over three ounces of grass.”
“He swallowed his stash?”
She shook her head. “Not pot. Actual grass, like from a lawn. A lawn that was in pretty crappy condition, because the grass is long and mostly dead. And the meat…”
“What about it?”
“We probably won’t know for sure until next week, but…it had fur on it.” She tapped her fingers against each other again. “My daughter has three pet rats. It looked like rat fur.”
A few ants got out. They carried hypotheses and ideas and wild guesses. He looked Forrester in the face. “Are you sure it’s him?”
She looked at the body. A few moments passed.
Mike studied her expression. “You saw his driver’s license?”
She nodded and cocked her head at a pair of file cabinets. “His personal effects are in there. They haven’t been processed yet. He had an old gym ID, too.”
“So,” he said, “what do you think?”
“I half-figured you were here to claim the body and tell me there was some kind of mix-up, that this guy had been living in a cave outside Fukushima for the past ten years.”
“Or black-bag you?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you think it’s a mix-up?”
Forrester shrugged. “Hair and eye color are right, even though his IDs don’t show the bad eye or the scarring. Height’s correct, blood type matches. We could try dental but he’s got seven teeth missing and two broken, which also doesn’t match either photo. I don’t see any fillings so we’d just be hoping for a lucky match. There were four positive identifications. You were one of them.”
“DNA testing?”
“Again, not a television crime lab.”
“Could you do it?”
“I’d need a sample to run it against.”
“I think I can get one for you. He had physicals pretty much every month or so. There should be some blood samples somewhere.”
“It’ll probably take a week or two. Maybe even a month.”
“I’ll see if there’s anything I can do to rush it a bit.”
“Good luck with that,” she said. “You’re only the government.”
“Can I ask you another question?”
“That’s why you’re here.”
“How old would you say he is?”
One side of her mouth pulled up. “I had the same thought when I was thinking this might be mistaken identity. But he checks out. There’s some malnutrition, but the curve of his spine, his joints—they’re all just what they should be for someone his age. And in his condition.”
“One other question.”
“Okay.”
Mike frowned at the corpse. “You didn’t find a baseball somewhere in him, did you?”
TWENTY-FIVE
“No baseball?”
Mike shook his head. “Not even scraps. She even did another set of X-rays to double-check for me. It’s vanished into thin air.”
Three t
housand miles away, Reggie leaned back in his chair. “Or it got picked up by an EMT who wanted a free baseball for his kid.”
“That I would’ve seen.”
“Is it really that important?”
“I think it is.” Mike crossed his arms and tapped his palm against his elbow. “His clothes were torn up, too.”
“What?”
“I saw his personal effects. Flipped them over, saw them from every angle.”
“That’s good, yes?”
“Yeah. They were frayed and crumbled in a couple of places. There were three distinct tears on his pants, two on his shirt.”
“Okay. And…?”
“The fraying and crumbling could be written off as a result of the crosswalk. I’m not sure how, because I still don’t know enough about the Door, but it’s not hard to imagine a powerful electromagnetic field having a general degenerative effect on materials. That’s something else to run past your experts.” The ants carried out images of the clothes spread out on the chrome table and lined them up in his mind. “Tearing’s a physical action, though, like the wound. It’s inflicted damage.”
“The machine gave him cancer, and you’re focused on his pants.”
“He didn’t catch his pants on something stepping through the rings and tear one of the cuffs half off. But the cuff is torn. And he got shot or stabbed with something.” Mike flipped the clothes in his mind and examined the burst stitching and the broken weave of the fabric. “They were dusty, too. In one step he accumulated about four ounces of dust, spread all through his clothes.”
“I saw a mattress commercial once that said most dust was human skin cells,” said Reggie. “Might explain his condition if a quarter pound of skin went ‘poof’ when he stepped through the rings.”
Mike closed his eyes and tried to recapture the sensation of rubbing the fabric between his fingers. His memory was strongest with sights and sounds. His other senses were still recorded, but they weren’t any sharper in memory than they were in real life. “The dust was gritty,” he said. “More like sand than…well, dust. Plus, there was the blood.”
“What about it?”
“There was blood soaked into his clothes. It was down his side and all over his left arm where he was trying to block it.”
“You said he had a good-sized hole in him.”
“Yeah,” said Mike, “but his clothes were already soaked as soon as he stepped through the Door. Almost two pints. And if he lost a quart of blood that fast, he should’ve been dead in seconds. That’s losing-a-limb bleeding.”
“Maybe it wasn’t his blood?”
Mike shook his head. “She tested it there. The blood type’s right.” He opened his eyes and paced in the trailer. “Everything about Bob’s body says that he gained at least a year’s worth of experiences in less than a second. But the medical examiner’s pretty sure he isn’t any older than he should be.”
Reggie shifted his jaw. “Time dilation? The Door lets people cross big distances very fast. Physics says that should be a time shift, right?”
A few more ants spilled over the walls in Mike’s mind. “Not exactly,” he said. “Again, not my field, but I’m pretty sure time dilation depends on speed. If Arthur’s telling the truth, the Albuquerque Door covers distance by bending space, not rushing through it. Bob was moving a mile and a half per hour, tops.”
“Ahhh.”
“Even if he wasn’t, moving faster would’ve meant time passed slower for him, not faster. A minute for us would’ve been a second for him.”
“And it didn’t even take a second to get through the Door.”
“Not even.”
“So he’s the right age for that.”
“It’s not time dilation. I know that much.”
“Are you sure?”
Mike uncrossed his arms. “I’m not really sure of anything out here.”
“You’re still sure no one caused it, though?”
“Sabotage?” Mike shook his head. “No real motive.”
“It got rid of Bob.”
“It got rid of Bob and shut the whole project down. Nobody here wants that.”
“Are you sure?”
Mike paused. “Pretty sure,” he said.
Reggie shifted in his chair. “Have Arthur’s people found anything?”
“No. They’ve taken the whole system apart and put it back together again. They can’t find anything that explains Bob’s injuries. Not even a loose wire.”
“Could it be something they’re hiding?”
“I think they’re hiding a lot of things.”
“About the accident?”
“About the Door itself. They’re just…” Ants streamed through his brain and piled into two or three minor skirmishes. “I think we might be coming at this the wrong way.”
Reggie started to speak, but Mike waved him quiet.
“Your people haven’t been able to find anything because they’re starting under the assumption Arthur and his team have what they want, the answer to a specific question.”
More and more ants had joined the battle. They struck at one another with images and sounds and ideas. The inside of his skull blurred with images.
“It’s not making any sense because we keep putting all the random snippets and clues in the same pile when there should be two or three. They’re not hiding one thing, they’re hiding a couple things. There’s stuff they know that they don’t want to share quite yet, but I think maybe there’s things they don’t know, either, and they’re trying to keep that ignorance hidden, too. Which means there’s probably still facts about the Door none of us even realize we’re looking at.”
“What they know,” said Reggie, “what they don’t know, and what they don’t know that they don’t know.”
“Yes, exactly,” he said. “The Door works, but I don’t think it works the way they’re telling everyone it does. But however they got it working, it does work. And they’re going to change the world and get a ton of recognition for it. So what are they worried about?”
Reggie cleared his throat. “It might all be moot,” he said. “I’ve been talking with some people. The board’s leaning toward denying the new budget.”
Mike shook the ants away. “I thought they were waiting for my report. Your report.”
His friend shrugged on the screen. “With Bob Hitchcock and Ben Miles, I think we’re looking at a two percent failure rate, yes?”
“Close enough.”
“That’s equal to three or four jumbo jets dropping out of the sky every day. How popular do you think air travel would be with that kind of survival rate?”
“You’re giving up?”
“I’m not doing anything except waiting for a full report from my man in the field. Show me it’s safe, that this was just a fluke, and it’s not going to give anyone else cancer, and I’ll make sure Arthur keeps getting checks.” Reggie’s eyes darted to the left. “I’ll talk to you later.” He reached forward and the tablet blinked back to its default screen.
Mike stared at it for a moment. Then he watched Bob die for the 234th time. The ants had a swarm of images and theories for him. None of them fit together well.
He headed back up to the main building. Anne smiled at him from the desk as he walked past her. He swiped his key card and walked out onto the main floor.
Olaf and Neil were there, each sitting at their stations. Olaf had a simulation running on his screen. They glanced up as Mike walked across the floor to them.
“How goes it?”
Neil looked at Olaf. “Fine,” said Bogart’s twin. “Is there something we can do for you?”
Mike stepped over the cables. “I was just wondering where Arthur is.”
Neil opened his mouth, but Olaf cut him off. “He was up in the booth about fifteen minutes ago. He might be in his office now.”
Neil turned back to his screen. He made a point of looking nowhere else.
Mike studied the two men. “Anything new on the…incident?�
�
“No,” said Olaf.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” he said. “We’re just busy. We’re in the middle of a simulation.”
“Of the incident?”
“Of something related to it, yes.”
“What?”
Olaf straightened up and turned from his station. “Weren’t you looking for Arthur?”
“Sorry.”
“Not a problem.”
Someone coughed over the speakers and Mike glanced up at the booth. “If you need any help,” he said, “just let me know.”
“Of course,” said Olaf.
Mike wandered back out into the hall and up the stairwell. He swiped his card again and unlocked the control room door. “Hey,” he said, “I was…”
Sasha looked over her shoulder at him and held up a finger. “Ready in two,” she said to the microphone.
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry. I thought Arthur was up here.”
She shook her head. “He’s over at Site B.”
Mike felt his brows furrow. “He’s monitoring a simulation from the other lab?”
“Simulation?”
He looked past her to the screens. The ants carried out the images from Olaf’s monitor a few moments ago. “You’re doing a full run? Even though we don’t know what happened last time.”
“That’s why we’re doing it,” said Sasha. She turned back to the screens. “We need data.”
He glanced around the room. “Wait a minute…why are you up here?”
“Someone’s got to monitor the system.” An icon on one of the monitors flashed, and she leaned toward the microphone. “Johnny has a solution. We are ready in one.” Her eyes glanced down at the lab and the shimmering rings.
“Why isn’t Jamie—”
The scurrying ants put the picture together in less than a second. Mike yanked open the control room door and dashed for the stairwell. He pushed past Anne in the hall, spilling her coffee, and ran for the big door. He swiped his card too fast. The reader didn’t get it until the second pass. The lock clicked and he yanked the door open.
Olaf made three quick keystrokes. “Power’s good.”
“No!” shouted Mike.
Threads of static electricity lashed around the rings, whipping back and forth between each one. An acid hiss echoed across the main floor. The air inside the rings thrashed and boiled.