This Darkness Got To Give

by Dave Housley

  “Dude. Dude!” Pete noticed that somebody was holding his arm and he wondered how long that had been happening, why he couldn’t feel anything along the right side of his body, who this person was who was squeezing his bicep, pulling him back away from the main concourse. He squinted but all he could make out was the hazy figure of a person standing right in front of him, their entire body obscured by what looked like a red cloud. “Pete,” the body said. Pete squinted, focused. He could just barely make out a face. It was somebody familiar, somebody he knew. “Oh shit,” the voice said. “Now both of you?” He felt hands on his face. “Peter,” the voice said. “It’s me. Padma.”

  Chapter 53

  July 9, 1995. Chicago, IL. Soldier Field

  Jenkins knew there was something the federal wasn’t telling him, something missing, a piece of the data that didn’t fit with the rest. The guy was nervous. No matter how much he tried to overplay his hand, coming on strong with his, “I don’t have time for this,” and his devices and official looking reports, the entire time he’d been picking at his cuticles, forming the skin into little balls, rolling them around on his fingertips and then starting again. A tell. A rookie mistake. But Jenkins could tell from the guy’s manicure that he hadn’t been in the field for some time, that this trip was special for some reason, and it was more than a few dozen dead junkies.

  The guy was this close to his pension, Jenkins thought, and still sitting here in a government-issue sedan watching uniforms process a scene. Even if he was here to support the kid, or to pull his element out of the field personally, it still didn’t add up. Guys like this send other guys. They don’t cancel tee times or dinner reservations to stand around a Deadhead parking lot watching the locals fill out paperwork on the dashboards of their black and whites.

  He reviewed what the guy, Nutter, had told him, laid the data out like notecards in his head. There was a federal agency to deal with the vampires. This made sense. If there was an agency to mow their lawns, leave Plasmatrol in coolers on their front porches, measure their body chemistry to make sure they weren’t slipping out at night and letting base impulses run wild, then it stood to reason that there was also an agency to clean up when something went wrong. Invasive Species Division. It was cute, he had to admit, to name the division something you could actually put on the front of a building and nobody would bat an eye.

  But Nutter was nervous, and he was here, and something about that did not add up. There was something else to it.

  Jenkins put the idea away. The picture was forming and this too would reveal itself, he knew, as soon as he was able to assemble the rest of the pieces.

  The vampire was sick, or not sick exactly, but being manipulated by Portis. There were three people on the inside, in some way connected to Invasive Species: the greaseball cop, a woman of about thirty, and the Deadhead kid.

  The kid was another matter altogether. He had some kind of gift, and Nutter had been vague on the nature of it and the way they’d come to find him. There it was. Why was he being vague about the kid, about whatever his power was? The answer to that question would point toward whatever Nutter was hiding, whatever was actually at the root of all of this, the picture formed out of all the smaller dots.

  The ambulance arrived, also blaring the siren despite his specific request that they come in silent. He watched the uniforms finishing up, clumping into groups, no doubt gossiping about what they’d seen. Soon it would be everywhere. Some cop with an axe to grind would call the news, and once it was in one outlet it would be everywhere, and then the vampire and the scientist would scatter to the wind and that would be that.

  Jenkins looked around. Nutter was still in his car, talking to somebody on his portable phone, or pretending to. The kid was nowhere to be found. The vampire was obviously gone. The scientist was gone. Tibor was dead. Crabtree had been dead for days.

  Jenkins watched the Deadheads meandering back and forth, the ambulance retreating toward the highway. He wondered if David had gone into the show, what he was doing, who those kids were. He had looked so happy. Carefree. It was amazing, really, so amazing he had forgotten to even be angry about it, and he knew that he wasn’t going to call David on whatever lie he’d given Kathleen to be here.

  David. Jesus, he thought. David was here. Everybody here was in danger. David was in danger.

  They were all back to ground, back to whatever had brought them here, wherever they were hiding or waiting or prepping. They needed some way to call them back together, use whatever frequency they were communicating on to get them out in the open.

  He knocked on the window of Nutter’s government issue. “We need the kid,” he said.

  Nutter looked nervous. He fumbled with his car phone, put it back in its place. “The kid is gone.”

  Chapter 54

  July 9, 1995. Chicago, IL. Soldier Field

  Padma steered them both to an open space. She really needed to get them back to the truck, back to a safe environment where the biker could be contained and Peter could come down off whatever it was he’d ingested. She tried to make them sit down but both of them were—how would Portis phrase it?—experiencing significant and unpredictable psychedelic effects related to the ingestion of an unknown substance.

  The biker had at least tripped before, she guessed, back before he had transitioned. She knew enough about him, or Portis did, to know that he may have even been at the initial acid tests at Kesey’s ranch. She thought about that, the biker outlaw passing by the little doctor, then just an assistant professor applying for grants, probably telling himself he was trying to make the world a better place. Maybe the two of them stood side by side while this very same band played in the barn, Cassidy and Mountain Girl and Allen Ginsberg wandering around.

  So much history. She would never live through that kind of history, and chasing it with Doctor Portis, with the agency, had been folly. What was happening now, she knew, was the opposite of the Acid Tests, which in a lot of real ways had launched the hippie movement, the Merry Pranksters and acid and the Grateful Dead, the idea that chasing enlightenment in a drug or a bus or books was an option. The Acid Tests were a beginning in a lot of very real ways, but what was happening now, what the Doctor had done with the biker, what Nutter and the Doctor were doing with each other, a decades-long grudge match, it was clear to her now that it was all a waste. It was some kind of ending. Which way it went was still on the table, but she’d seen enough of both sides to know she would side with neither the Doctor nor Nutter. But where did that leave her?

  Peter was wandering in small circles. She pulled him close, put her hands on his face gently. “It’s me, Peter,” she said.

  “Padma,” he said. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” she said.

  “It’s all been lies, Padma,” he said. “Padma. Pad…ma,” he drew the name out slowly, like he was trying out the way it sounded in his mouth.

  “I’m going to give you something,” she said. “That may or may not have an effect on you, depending on what you’ve taken.”

  It was risky, but it was all she could think of. Portis would know the right dosage, what the effects were likely to be. She had paid attention and had enough science of her own to know that this was the best of her limited options.

  She held out the dose and he popped it in his mouth immediately. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Sure. Suuuure…suuuuuure…suuuuuuuuure.”

  The biker had calmed down and was laying on his back, looking up at the sky. She sat down next to him and patted the ground for Peter. He sat down and lay back. “Whoa,” he said.

  The biker sat up. “He’s your friend?” he said. She nodded. “And he’s not…like me? He’s normal?”

  “Not really normal,” she said. “Special somehow?”

  “I could feel him,” the biker said. “Before. And now. The same way with the dealer.”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s good.”

  If she could get them back to the truck, she could isolate the bike
r and get Peter someplace safe. The doctor was not safe, though, and he was probably with the truck.

  “Do you remember him?” she said. “The doctor?”

  “Remember him? I remember he gave me that dose in Philly.” The drug was settling in his nervous system now and the biker was managing it better. “I can’t see the auras anymore,” he said. “I was hoping that was permanent.”

  “There are phases,” she said. “Kind of almost an overdose, to be honest? The beginning is particularly psychedelic.”

  “Phases,” he said. He lay back down on his back. “Overdose. You have a nice aura,” he said. “Yellowy, purple.”

  She sat up and checked her watch. She hoped Peter would come down soon, too. Her only other option was to find Nutter and the cops and hope they could manage him, but something told her she would be better off on her own. Nutter had his own agenda. Everybody had their own agenda except these two poor tripping souls who had wandered or been drawn into this situation and still had no idea what it was even about.

  “We’ll need everything we have, I think,” the biker said.

  “What?” she said. “Why?”

  “He’s coming back.”

  Chapter 55

  July 9, 1995. Chicago, IL. Soldier Field

  Eighteen months until the pension. Eighteen goddamn months and then, what? A party, a gold watch, his name on a plaque or not depending on how this last thing went, on how much of the old history got dug up as these latest bodies got put down, processed, and investigated. As somebody started to put together the pieces, the new and the old, until they formed the dotted line that wound over the years between him and Portis. The agency had destroyed most of it in ’73, thank goodness, two years before the joint committee hearings.

  He needed to get out of this car, do something. Portis knew too much. Way too much. The girl knew too much, too, although he wasn’t sure what she would do with her information. Maybe walk away. Maybe threaten a suit. Field operatives were difficult to predict, heady and impulsive. The girl was different, though: smart, thoughtful, reliable. It would be a shame if she had to go away. Putting her with Portis was a risk he thought he had needed to take at the time, but it was another false move, another chain in the trap he’d built for himself.

  He got out of the car and motioned for Jenkins. The kid could call Portis. They needed to find the kid. Nutter opened the briefcase and fumbled with the computer. He had no idea if the thing would even work here, in the middle of a parking lot a few miles outside the city. They stood there listening to the low hum of the machine starting up.

  “Know how to use that thing?” Jenkins said. Nutter just grunted. He entered his password and waited while a spinning ball danced around his screen. “I been putting in requests for something like that for, shit, two years now,” Jenkins said.

  Nutter opened the tracking program and watched as the map zeroed in Chicago and then the parking lot. Two dots were blinking: Spot and the kid.

  “Holy shit,” Jenkins said.

  “Tax dollars at work,” Nutter said. He looked across the parking lot. “Looks like they’re over there,” he said. “That direction at least.” He started walking and Jenkins followed.

  “Isn’t there an easier way to do that?” he said, holding up his walkie talkie.

  “Chance that Spot quit tonight,” Nutter said. “The other undercover. The one who seems, well, like maybe he’s gone a little native.”

  “What do you mean there’s a chance?”

  “Turned off his walkie. Didn’t remove his tracking bracelet, though. Which could mean he’s just not thinking or could mean he’s tracking the kid, keeping him in sight in case we need him.”

  “The kid,” Jenkins said. “He has, I don’t know, some kind of power. Ability?”

  “He does,” Nutter said.

  “How?”

  Nutter stopped and regarded Jenkins. The guy was still dressed in his hippie costume, but there was no doubt he knew what he was doing. Jenkins made him nervous. His initial impulse, to keep Jenkins on the case even though he was aware of his history, even though he’d been a part of the goddamn partner program, had been wrong. Keep your enemies close was good advice, maybe, as it concerned politics, but not good police who had the potential to track the money back to the source and see what it was that had really set the entire thing in motion.

  Before all of this started up again, he’d imagined the words they would say at his retirement dinner: valor, meritorious, trailblazer, public safety. Now he was one nosy cop or missed opportunity away from the other words overtaking the story of his lifetime of service: mind control, LSD, misappropriated funds, lack of oversight, death, murder, Project MKUltra.

  Jenkins ran a hand through his thinning hair. “You know what? Never mind,” he said. “Fuck it. I don’t need to know and maybe I don’t want to. Let’s just, I don’t know, protect the public safety.”

  Nutter nodded and continued walking. “Works for me,” he said.

  “Something tells me you’re not going to have the same level of paperwork as me,” Jenkins said.

  Nutter smiled. “One of the many benefits of not technically existing.”

  Chapter 56

  July 9, 1995. Chicago, IL. Soldier Field

  Pete guessed this is what they called coming down. He felt himself settling down into reality all of a sudden, all the aches and pains and worries draining right back into his veins. His Achilles tendons hurt from all the walking and a blister had started up where his sandal was rubbing against the top of his right foot. He was developing acne on the places below his nose and to the side of his mouth where a thin stubble had been forming for the past week. It was like going from drunk to hungover with no space in between and all he wished for was sleep.

  He sat down next to the biker, who nodded and lay back down on his back. Pete realized that he held the vampire no more responsible for what had happened than he would a boulder that had been tipped from its place at the top of a mountain. Was this police work? He had no idea.

  “Rest if you can,” Padma said.

  Padma was a liar. Everybody was a liar. Everything was a lie.

  “He’s coming back,” the biker said.

  Pete remembered everything that had just happened to him, in great detail. He wasn’t sure if it had been a few minutes or an hour or a day. He wanted to ask what day it was but he didn’t want to fully end the spell and it seemed to him that words were the best way to make that happen. It had been real, the entire thing, he knew that as surely as he knew anything. The colors were in him now and they were true.

  He wondered if he was really through it. He’d read that you could relapse, that it could alter your brain chemistry. Nutter had assured him that this was just as much folklore as vampires flying, but he also knew now that he couldn’t really trust Nutter.

  Suddenly he flashed on a vision, a chessboard empty save two pieces in the form of men: Nutter on one side, the professor on the other.

  This is what it had always been, all of it, the vampires and the hippies and the experiments, whatever it was that had been left in him by his poor mother, whatever it was that lingered in the hippie and in the old vampire, even the hissing of the nitrous tanks and the sounds from the car speakers—they were scenery in a battlefield, collateral damage in a contest that had been going on for decades.

  He lay down and closed his eyes and focused on the color purple, the fact of it, pure and true as the ground under their feet, sure as the moon. He saw his own role, a pawn in the game, another piece moved around, Nutter’s agent bearing gifts handed down through biology from murdered mother to unwitting son. Is that who he was? Maybe.

  If it’s meant to be it will happen.

  Pete stood up. He was shaky on his feet. Padma offered an arm and he squatted, waited to regain his balance. It was clear now. So clear. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking at Padma while the biker stared. “I have somewhere to be.”

  Chapter 57

  July 9, 1
995. Chicago, IL. Soldier Field

  Cain watched the kid walk into the crowd. He was wavering slightly but holding steady. On a mission. He looked at the girl and she was smiling, watching him go. She shook her head and turned to Cain, held her hands up in a helpless gesture. “Huh,” she said, but she was still smiling. “I honestly don’t…” she said, and then she gave up and just watched him go, the little thatch of brown hair getting smaller in the distance until he blended in with all the other kids walking up and down Shakedown, and then they couldn’t see him at all.

  Whatever she had given him had lessened the effect of the dose, and as he looked up at her he could still make out a hazy purple aura. He supposed it was healthy, although he didn’t have any reason to think so other than the way she smelled—no sign of the rot he could smell on some of the others.

  He still wasn’t sure exactly what was happening. He would either return to his careful ways, to the person he’d become after the change, or he would end it once and for all and find out if there was anything next. He had never thought so, hadn’t even thought about it much at all before the change, but something like the change, like the risks it put him in and the few occasions when the folklore was right, it was enough to make a person think about more than biology. And what he’d done over the past few weeks, what he’d become…he hoped he’d been right all along, that the end was nothing but darkness and sleep.

  “It’s starting again,” he said. The familiar tingle had been buzzing in his fingers for minutes and he realized he was getting used to it, that other than the beacon alert in his head, almost like a magnetic pull, he might not have noticed anything at all.