by David Wong
Owen didn’t answer, because he was looking past me. Something deep in my nasal passages noted that the scent of the smoke took on a more sophisticated tone. Instead of the meaty smell of barbecue mixed with the acrid smell of particle board and veneer, I suddenly smelled the sweet, rich fragrance of pipe tobacco. I turned and there was Dr. Marconi, puffing on his pipe with one hand dipped into the jacket pocket of a pinstriped suit. He looked so out of place here he seemed like a hologram.
Marconi said, “Can I ask what this gathering is about?”
I said, “I been sentenced to die but Owen here has agreed to let me write a note to Amy before he shoots me.”
Marconi nodded and said, “I see. You realize, David, that other men do not find themselves in this kind of predicament with the same frequency that you do? I’m beginning to think it’s something you’re doing.”
To Owen, he said, “Can it wait fifteen minutes? I would like to pull Mr. Wong aside and take him up to my floor. I actually believe I’m on the verge of a breakthrough with detection but I’ll need his skill this one last time.”
No answer from Owen. Marconi said, “It really is for the good of all of us, if it works. You can stand right outside my door, if you think this is a ruse to help him escape, though I personally cannot imagine what such a plan would entail. It would also give him the chance to confess his sins, so it would be a personal favor to me, as a former man of the cloth it would weigh on me greatly if I didn’t at least offer him the opportunity.”
Owen pointed the gun at the sky and said, “If it was anybody but you, doc…”
“You know I do not ask lightly.” To me, he said, “Will you take this opportunity to let me show you something? And to reconcile yourself with the creator you’re about to meet?”
3 Hours Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
John jolted awake to find himself staring down a shotgun wielded by his greatest enemy: himself.
He had fallen asleep in the Caddie, his shotgun in his lap. He must have shifted position at some point. If he’d coughed, he’d have vaporized his own skull. The sun stared angrily through his windshield. John blinked and threw open the driver’s-side door, needing to get out and take a piss. He almost fell and broke his neck—the Caddie was sitting six feet off the ground. Then he remembered.
The night before, he’d parted company with the Undisclosed zombie militia and made the nervous trek on foot from Dave’s house up to the burrito stand, only to find the Caddie was not in fact where they’d left it. At that point his only possible hope of finding it again was if it had gotten towed away, back at a stage of the apocalypse when a car partially blocking the street was still considered a priority on somebody’s list. John jogged twelve blocks to the towing company impound yard, expecting to be decapitated by a monster at any moment.
The good news was that he wasn’t. The further good news was that the Caddie was in fact there and that the tall fence had been cut open by some other looter or vandal days ago. The bad news was that the Caddie was apparently the last seized vehicle before towing was shut down—it was still on the back of the tow truck. The truck was the flatbed type, where the whole bed tilted down to form a ramp and let the car roll on and off—a technology that probably came about because the old hook style yanked off too many bumpers in the course of dragging cars out of handicapped parking spaces.
John had jumped up onto the truck’s bed and opened the Caddie’s trunk, expecting to find that everything had been stolen. But apparently even the looters who ransacked the impound yard took one glance at the rusting piece of shit and deduced that there could be nothing in the trunk worth the effort of prying it open. That was probably a good thing for both the citizens and law enforcement of Undisclosed. Inside they’d have found the aforementioned shotgun (a custom-made triple-barrel sawed-off), two hundred shells, Dave’s blood-splattered chainsaw, the green mystery box taken from Dave’s shed, a bag of Dave’s clothes, a bottle of Grey Goose, a bad black velvet painting of Jesus and a fucking flamethrower.
The keys had still been in the tow truck (in fact, the driver’s-side door was standing open from when the driver had run screaming from whatever mob or unholy terror was coming his way). John spent twenty minutes trying to figure out the controls for tilting down the ramp and never could. It was either take the tow truck itself, or walk. So, for the third time in ten days, he commandeered a vehicle for use in a mission, promising himself he would return it when it was over. He was one for two so far.
That is how John wound up spending the night tooling around town in the tow truck with the Caddie piggybacking. One thing he had noticed when he was out: people. Lots of people. Since REPER had retreated and stopped enforcing the curfew, every street corner had grown clumps of people bristling with hunting rifles and shotguns and revolvers and machetes. John was comforted by that for about five seconds, then he saw the looks in the eyes of these harried, tired, cold, frustrated people and realized they would butcher his ass if he even so much as let out a yawn that sounded too much like a moan.
Just before dawn, John had passed the quarantine, which looked even more impregnable than it had with time on pause. Floodlights and armed drones were all powered up and standing guard. Driving slow to avoid the armed crowds that were wandering across the streets, John had made his way up to the asylum. A crowd was busy up there. Dozens of members of the militia were surrounding an RV parked in the yard. The pickup with the wood chipper was parked next to a long ditch that had been dug in the yard, and the chipper was running.
John had edged closer, as close as he could without exiting the tow truck (which he was not going to fucking do) and saw bodies. The militia was dragging them out of a basement window and laying them in a row in the grass. Another crew was picking them up, one by one, and feeding them into the chipper. The chipper was, in turn, filling the ditch with red slush.
Oh holy mother of—
John had heard a scream at that point, and saw a gang of militia approach from the street, dragging a cursing man covered in tattoos. He was thrashing around and lobbing insults at his captors, insisting on his innocence, and his humanity. The captors conferred with Tightpants Cowboy, who was in charge of the zombie disposal operation apparently. The tattooed man’s trial lasted forty-five seconds, then Cowboy vaporized the man’s forehead with two shotgun shells. Into the chipper he went.
John got the fuck out of there.
* * *
He had headed as far outside of town as he could get without running into the REPER barricades. So, John had parked the tow truck, with the Caddie piggybacking, in a cornfield a mile or so from the water tower construction site, the REPER barricade now standing between there and where he’d spoken to Dave for the last time. He had gotten drowsy, then climbed up to the Caddie because he figured the higher vantage point would give him an advantage if he was ambushed while he slept.
John sat upright and worked his stiff joints. He threw the shotgun into the passenger seat where it clinked off the empty Grey Goose bottle. The gun was a custom-made job he’d bought at one of the gun shows he frequented. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked—firing all three barrels would chop down a small tree. He kept double-aught buck loaded into the two side barrels, and a slug in the middle. Give the target a nice variety of projectiles to think about.
He needed to get into quarantine. And not as a patient, either. He needed to get in there with the implements of destruction in the Caddie’s trunk. John pictured himself just plowing toward the fence in the tow truck, but remembered the concrete barricades meant to stop somebody from doing just that.
Well, sitting here was accomplishing nothing. John jumped down, pissed for several minutes, then threw himself into the tow truck.
2 Hours, 45 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
Marconi led me up to the second floor, with Owen in tow. He made Owen stay outside of the makeshift hospital within a hospital, telling him there was a risk of him spreading the nasty stomach f
lu to the rest of the quarantine.
Once on the other side of a door, Marconi muttered, “We have less time than I thought.”
“What? Before Owen shoots me?”
“No. Believe it or not, that’s actually not our most pressing problem.”
He led me to a window and said, “Look. Beyond the fence.”
I did. A freaking crowd was gathering out there. “Holy shit, doctor. Who are those people?”
“Looks like everyone.”
Hundreds of people. Cars were parked here and there, scattered like toys out beyond the fence. People were sitting on the hoods, or were off in bunches, talking. Everyone seemed to have a gun. I swear one person actually brought a pitchfork.
Marconi said, “Your neighbors, your coworkers, the people who mow your lawn and deliver your mail.”
Nobody mows my lawn.
“I don’t understand.”
“Critical mass, Mr. Wong. They’re going to get what They wanted. And I haven’t the faintest idea of how to stop it.”
“Who? Who’s going to get what they want? The mob, you mean?”
Marconi looked me in the eye and said, “We’re speaking in private, I assume that we can drop all pretense. This conversation will take longer if we filter everything through a façade of skepticism of the supernatural, and at least one of us doesn’t have the time. If I have seen the shadow men lurking about, then I assume you have, too.”
I sighed and said, “Yes, doctor.”
“So when I speak of an invisible ‘They’ working against us, you’ll not waste precious seconds asking who ‘They’ are. The shadows, and the men who knowingly or unknowingly work on their behalf.”
They.
I often wondered if “they” had an office building somewhere, where They sat around a long, black granite conference table with a pentagram etched into the top. Or maybe They had a headquarters inside a hollowed-out volcano, like a James Bond villain. Or maybe They had the technology to leap effortlessly across time and space, holding shareholder meetings on the surface of Mars, or on top of a plateau in Pangaea circa 200 million B.C.
John and I knew very little about Them, which made me an expert when compared to the general population, who don’t know They exist at all. They are people, or at least They assume the form of people. They are wealthy, or at least have access to wealth, or maybe have means which render wealth as we understand it moot. The little Asian man who disappeared into the burrito stand was surely one of Them, as was whoever was waiting for that convoy of black trucks we saw last summer.
But all I have are rumors, stories John dug up on the Internet probably written by people who know even less than we do. Some say it’s a cabal of wealthy men who, centuries ago, poured Their wealth into experimentation with the occult. At some point, the story goes, They tapped into a dark power that They saw as one more resource to be exploited, the way that humans would later learn to split the atom and use it to power our televisions and hair driers. Instead, the legend goes, the dark energies that poured forth infected Them, corrupting these men who learned too late that the power They had bought would cost them the last remnants of Their own souls. That’s the story, anyway. Shit, for all I know, They wrote that version of the story and the truth is another three layers down. That’s how They work.
These days, if you ask John to summarize who They are, you get only one answer: “Well, they’re not fucking vampires, I’ll tell you that.” Then he’ll stare hard at you for a solid minute until you walk away.
Marconi tapped the side of one of the jugs that contained the spider specimens. It didn’t react, but still I wished he wouldn’t do it. He said, “This was always chess, not checkers. I’m not sure you ever fully understood that.”
I said, “Tennet. You know that name? Claims to be a psychiatrist but suddenly turns up consulting for this agency nobody’s ever heard of? REPER?”
“Oh, he’s a psychiatrist. Search his past and you’ll find twenty-five distinguished years in that profession, an expert on the virulent nature of fear. And likewise, if it just so happened that he needed to be a plumber in order to be in an advantageous position to observe and influence the situation, then you would find a quarter century of plumbing in his background. And so on. He would be whatever is required.”
“Can’t somebody investigate him? If his licenses and all that are fake then—”
“I didn’t say he would use false documents. I said he would actually have twenty-five years on the job. Whatever job. Do you understand? Again, chess. With a very advanced player who can see many moves ahead. They put their pieces into position.”
Marconi checked the vitals on a sleeping patient as he spoke, puffing on his pipe the whole time. I again wondered to what degree Dr. Marconi actually knew anything about medicine.
He said, “In the case of Dr. Tennet, he not only has specialized in treating violent and paranoid patients since the 1980s, but has written multiple prominent books on the subject, and dozens of journal articles. More pertinent to this situation, he has also written extensively on the subject of group paranoia and crowd dynamics in crisis situations. He didn’t have to infiltrate the government. When the ‘outbreak’ hit, they came to him. Do you understand? The pieces are always positioned where They need them.”
“Right, and ‘They’ are dicks.”
“But we can’t stop there. We need to ask the big question: what do They want?”
“To … kill us all?”
“Ha! We should be blessed with an adversary with such uncomplicated ambitions. No, war is never about killing the enemy. War is about remaking the world to suit the whims of some powerful group over the whims of some other powerful group. The dead are just the sparks that fly from the metal as they grind it down.”
2 Hours, 40 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
John didn’t get within three blocks of the hospital quarantine. There were people everywhere. It was like the afternoon of the Fourth of July, when everybody ambles out to the park in loose groups to find a place to watch fireworks. Only instead of carrying blankets and lawn chairs, everybody was armed to the teeth. From the driver’s seat of the tow truck, John recognized a familiar cowboy hat and denim-wrapped ass walking nearby. John pulled up to where Tightpants Cowboy was on the sidewalk, shouting orders to somebody. John rolled down the window and Tightpants said, “Did Hank send you out here? We’re still four short.”
John said, “Uh, no. Is Falconer around?”
“The detective? He went off on his own. Said he had to follow up on a lead.”
“Shit. What is all this?”
“It’s the end of the world, where you been all week?”
“What?”
“What’s your name again?”
“John. Yours?”
“Jimmy DuPree. Pleased to meet you. We’re makin’ sure the quarantine holds until the air force can blow the shit out of it in about…”
2 Hours, 35 Minutes Until the Aerial Bombing of Undisclosed
Marconi said, “I mentioned my book earlier. The Babel Threshold.”
“Yeah. I said I hadn’t read it. I usually wait for the movie.”
“Try to focus, please. Do you understand the significance of the title? You know the Tower of Babel, right? You went to Sunday School?”
“Yeah, sure. In ancient times everybody on earth spoke the same language, then they decided to build a tower that would reach all the way up to heaven. Then God cursed everybody on the job site to each speak a different language to mess them up.”
“Exactly. ‘And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men buildeth. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do, and now nothing will be restrained from them. Let us go down, and there confound their language.’ It’s right there in the text, Mr. Wong—God’s motivation in that story is that he was afraid. He limited our ability to communicate because he was afraid that, operating as o
ne, we would challenge His power.”
“Man, I hope you’re not about to tell me that all of this shit is a curse from God because we built our buildings too tall. Kind of a flat town to impose that lesson on. You’d think he’d take it to Dubai.”
“No. But there is a parallel. Are you familiar with Dunbar’s number?”
“No.”
“You should, it governs every moment of your waking life. It is our Tower of Babel. The restraint that governs human ambition isn’t a lack of a unified language. It’s Dunbar’s number. Named after a British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar. He studied primate brains, and their behavior in groups. And he found something that will change the way you think about the world. He found that the larger the primate’s neocortex, the larger the communities it formed. It takes a lot of brain to process all of the relationships in a complex society, you see. When primates find themselves in groups larger than what their brains can handle, the system breaks down. Factions form. Wars break out. Now, and do pay attention, because this is crucial—you can actually look at a primate brain and, knowing nothing else about what species it came from, you can predict how big their tribes are.”
“Does Owen have a watch? Because when you told him fifteen minutes I’m not sure if he’s going to take that as a literal fifteen minutes, or…”
“We’ll deal with him in a moment, but I take your point. The salient issue here is that every primate has a number.” Marconi gestured to the crowd gathering outside the fence. “Including those primates out there. Including you and I. Based on the size of a human’s neocortex, that number is about a hundred and fifty. That’s how many other humans we can recognize before we max out our connections. With some variability among individuals, of course. That is our maximum capacity for sympathy.”
I stared at him. I said, “Wait, really? Like there’s an actual part of our brain that dictates how many people we can tolerate before we start acting like assholes?”