Niceville

by Carsten Stroud

  In his ramble through Bock’s hard drive Chu had come across Bock’s medical records. The guy had a serious cholesterol problem and was probably going to need multiple arterial stents sometime in the future, if he was ever going to see the north side of fifty. The last thing Chu wanted right now was for Tony Bock to pitch a myocardial infarct.

  He waited a bit, anxiously studying Bock’s complexion, which had settled down somewhere between waxy and clammy. Chu figured he wasn’t going to die yet.

  “Okay, well, first, Tony, this shame you are feeling, this is a good sign. If you were really a bad person, I would think you would not be half so ashamed. Like I said, I don’t judge you about the sex thing. I am Chinese, from Macao, one of the most crowded cities on the planet. How do you think it got so crowded?”

  Chu waited for a smile at his joke, got only a bug-eyed stare and a froglike gasping.

  He went on, speaking as if he had given this thing a lot of thought, which he had.

  “Okay … let me say this carefully. We agree that—oh, by the way, I have made a complete copy of everything on your drives, just so we are okay together, in the same place, yes?”

  “How … how did you find …?”

  Chu smiled at him.

  “There are amateurs and there are professionals, Tony. You are an amateur. I have spent six years—postgraduate—at MIT and Caltech—studying only the way computers and the Net encounter each other. You are, I hope I get this correct, an energy auditor for Niceville Utility, yes? A graduate also of East-Central-Mid-State-Poly?”

  Bock was going down again, so Chu kept talking.

  “Anyway, you might want to know that all of these so-called hush-mail sites—even the ones in Iceland, which is an outlaw state with regard to the Internet—they are all watched. Agencies have set up these virtual watchers at the outer gates of all these portals and whenever somebody uses one, a note is made of the IP. It took me less than fifteen minutes to find out your IP location, and less than that to break your firewall and take over your machine. I see this is not pleasant to hear, so I’ll go on … will I? … with why I am here.”

  The meals came, and Chu daintily devoured his. Bock rallied enough to attack the wine but food was out of the question.

  Mostly he was thinking, Run run run.

  Change my name.

  Get out of town.

  “First, Tony, I am not here to blackmail you.”

  Bock stopped at the bottom of his glass, stared through it at Chu, set it down.

  “No?”

  “No. No offense, Tony, but I know to the penny what you make every month, what you have in the bank, and in savings, and what you have to pay to your ex-wife, Miss Dellums, and your daughter, and for your rent to Miss Kinnear. Tony, my friend, I make ten times what you make. Some years twenty. I have made investments. I am very comfortably off for a man only in his thirties.”

  Thirties? thought Bock. I thought you were fifteen years old.

  “So I am not interested in your money. Do you know what an American H-One visa is, Tony?”

  Bock shook his head, his mind still turning over the phrase Not here to blackmail you.

  “Okay, H-One visas are usually given to people with extraordinary ability in an area of highly specialized knowledge. Such as information technology and computer science. I am such a person. I am a citizen of the People’s Republic of China, and my residency here is, to be blunt, at the discretion of my employer. Under the H-One rules, my visa has to be supported by something called a Labor Certification. The rules are complex, but the short story is if my employer wishes to, he can withdraw my Labor Certification, and my visa is gone. I can appeal, but, if an employer has influence, one can be forced to go back to his homeland and reapply for another H-One visa. Do you follow this?”

  “Yes, I think I do.”

  “Good. To put it simply, my employer and I are not on good terms, but I do not wish to return to the People’s Republic of China.”

  “Now?”

  “Now or ever. To be honest, were I to be confronted with the certainty of deportation back to Macao, I would put a bullet in my head.”

  “Yow,” said Bock. “You really don’t want to go back, do you? Why not?”

  Chu studied Bock for a while.

  “I won’t make it a big lecture. I will keep it simple. Aside from a very strong personal reason which has to do with the animosity between myself and my older brother, who is something of a gangster in Macao, it is simply that in America I am a free man. In China, on the other hand, I am a snot-rag. I can be nose-blown upon and tossed away by anyone with power over me. China is not a free place. Everybody knows that it is a busy place, a beehive nation of industry, with lots of money being made. Nobody in the West cares how that nation of industry treats its people. In China it is possible now to prosper but it is not possible to live without fear of the government. The government has absolute power over everyone. If you are not pleasing the government terrible things will happen to you without warning and without hope of the slightest mercy. This is no way for a human to live. It is degrading. It makes cowards of the good people. And cringing informants of the rest. I refuse to live like this.”

  Here he paused, going quiet, seeing something dark, and the shadow of it flitted across his unmarked face. He shook it off, brightened.

  “So, in spite of the difficulties of my present employment—I work for a most unpleasant man—here is still better than there, and I am not going back to China to live like a serf just because Byron Deitz doesn’t like me.”

  “Byron Deitz? I’ve heard of him.”

  “Yes? A powerful figure in Niceville?”

  “Yeah. Owns a big security company.”

  “Yes. He does. He is my boss. He is also a traitor to your country. And we are going to punish him.”

  “We?”

  “Yes. You and I.”

  “How?”

  It took Chu a few minutes to explain. At the end of it, Bock had multiple objections but they could be succinctly conveyed by the two phrases No fucking way and Are you totally fucking nuts?

  “Yes,” said Andy Chu, with a smile. “I am.”

  Lenore

  After his call to Kate, Dillon Walker located a text file on his computer and hit PRINT. Outside the window of his office in the Preston Library a soft afternoon light lay on the drill square and the old Federal-style buildings.

  The weather had been fine all that day, cool and clear, with just a shadow of cloud along the top of the Blue Ridge.

  He could hear, through the half-open window of his book-lined study, the rhythmic cadence of a cadet platoon running through the grounds, the steady tramp of their feet like a muffled drum on the quad, the words as familiar to him as when he had first learned to chant them himself, as a young soldier in the 101st Airborne so many years ago. He listened for a moment longer to the chant. His hands on the keyboard in front of him were knotted and bent with arthritis, barely able to type. It was hard to see them as they had been on that June day in 1944, firmly clutching his parachute straps as he floated down into a firestorm at Normandy. He had not known it at the time, but he had been within a mile of his friend Gray Haggard, who was at that same moment trying not to drown in the bloody foam off Omaha Beach.

  The running cadence faded into the distance and a cool wind stirred the blinds, making them rattle in their traces and fluttering his papers on the broad rosewood desk.

  Someone called his name, softly, from out in the dim corridor of the library, beyond his office door. This was odd, since the place was closed on Saturday afternoons, all the cadets out on an exercise, the library usually deserted.

  He sat back in his creaking chair, cocked an ear. “Hello? I’m in here? Who is it?”

  Silence, and then it came again, a soft whispering voice, at once familiar and very strange.

  A muscle in his cheek quivered and he put a finger to his throat, feeling the carotid throb.

  He was seventy-four and althou
gh he had nothing in particular wrong with him, that was just another way of saying that everything was wrong with him.

  The voice was a voice he knew, although he had not heard it for years. It was Lenore, and this was why, as a rational man, he was checking his pulse, since he was apparently having some sort of seizure.

  He reached out for the water bottle on the credenza behind him and sipped at it, fumbling in a drawer for an aspirin. The voice spoke again, closer now, and a slender figure appeared on the other side of the pebbled glass door of his office.

  He watched the figure, young, female, dressed in either a white form-fitting dress or nothing at all, watched as she lifted an arm and knocked once, softly, on the glass.

  “Dilly, it’s Lenore. It’s time, honey. We have to go. Everything is ready. Everyone is waiting.”

  Dillon Walker felt a shudder of fear ripple through him, which, hating any form of cowardice, he crushed at once.

  Dilly.

  Lenore always called me Dilly.

  He stood up and came around the desk, pausing in front of the door. He looked around the room with regret, and then back at his desk, half expecting to see his dead body slumped across the papers. But the chair was empty and he was here in his slippers and his comfortable olive-drab corduroy slacks and his black polo shirt, feeling very much alive.

  The figure, now that he was close, was very naked and very much in the shape of his dead wife. The image knocked again and called his name.

  She uses the mirrors, Lenore had said, moments before her death. She uses the mirrors.

  He felt himself at the edge of some great thing, on the brink of a great revelation, an encounter with something powerful and strange—something … outside.

  Not to open that door would be an act of cowardice, a sniveling and greedy attempt to scrape a few more seconds of life off his plate. His work here was not done, but it would be completed by others. No man was indispensable. He thought about Kate, and Reed, and Beth, about Rainey Teague and his adoption, about Miles and Sylvia, and the essential strangeness of Niceville. If what was beyond the door was really Lenore, then everything that was hidden from him would be revealed, and he would one day see all of his family again. Sooner or later, for every living man, the time came to leave.

  He opened the door, thinking he would see Lenore, but instead darkness flew at him, black wings, razor-edged beaks, claws ripping, yellow eyes with a green light, a crushing force thick with rage and hate. The feeding began. Like Gray Haggard, he lasted far too long.

  Kate Kavanaugh Has a Visitor

  For a long time Kate refused to think about what her father had said about the mirrors, refused to even attempt to make sense of it. She put her head back, closed her eyes for a while, felt a warm wave of fatigue roll over her.

  She slept.

  The phone rang.

  She picked it up, looked at the call display—L. STEINERT.

  “Lacy?”

  “Hi, Kate. I’m sorry to call you at home.”

  “You sound tense.”

  “Not tense, no. But I’m trying to get in touch with Nick and he’s not answering his cell. Tig says he was out on a disappearance, and that he had gone to get some bloodstains checked, but he’s not at the police lab either.”

  She looked at the time—after four—he’d be home around nine, if nothing went crazy at work.

  “He usually cuts out for lunch around this time, if he’s working. You could try the Bar Belle at the Pavilion. It’s his favorite lunch spot. I have their number, if you like?”

  A pause.

  “No, it’s not … I’ve left messages. He’ll call back sooner or later.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. Was it urgent?”

  “No. Well, I think he’d like to know.”

  “Is it good news? He could use some.”

  “Nobody knows this yet, so keep it close until I can get to Nick. You need to know about it too, since you’re his legal guardian. It’s about Rainey Teague—”

  “Oh hell. Not dead?”

  “No. He woke up.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. Well, I mean, he didn’t just suddenly sit up and ask for a cookie. The doctors are with him. But he’s come out of the … whatever it was, and he’s … ‘responsive’ … was the way they put it. You remember I was talking to you about Lemon Featherlight?”

  “Yes. He wanted to see Nick.”

  “Lemon was the one who found him. Awake, I mean. Lemon had gone to see him after he spoke to Nick this morning—he tell you about that?”

  “No. He hasn’t. What was Lemon doing there?”

  “Lemon and Rainey were friends. I know, sounds odd, but Lemon took what happened to Rainey pretty hard, so after he spoke to Nick he thought he should go down and see the kid again. Anniversary of it, I guess, or whatever. Lemon’s a strange guy, but he’s got a good heart. Anyway, he walks into the CCU room and the nurses are all clustered around the bed, bells and whistles are going off, and he can hear Rainey crying and asking for some guy named Abel Teague. Nobody knew who the hell he was, maybe a relative. Anyway, it was all pretty chaotic, but now Lemon wants to see Nick again. Like, ASAP, if he can. So I’m calling around—”

  Kate broke in.

  “Did you say Abel Teague?”

  “Yes. Abel Teague.”

  “Rainey was asking for somebody named Abel Teague?”

  “Yes. Kate, you sound funny.”

  “I feel funny.”

  No time to try to explain this to Lacy.

  “Have you tried his beeper?”

  “A beeper? Who has a beeper these days?”

  “Nick does. It’s for just us. He hates the cell and a lot of times he just shuts it off for lunch. But the beeper he keeps on, in case I really need to get in touch with him.”

  “Oh jeez. I’m not using that, then. How about you just tell him, if he calls, to get in touch with me right away. Lemon is going nuts.”

  “I’ll do it, Lacy. And that is good news, about Rainey, isn’t it?”

  “I sure hope so. Does the name Abel Teague mean anything to you?”

  “Why?”

  “Because when I said his name your voice went all tight. What’s going on?”

  “Yes. The name means something to me.”

  “What?”

  “Lacy, when I know, you’ll know.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise. Bye-bye.”

  Kate stared at the phone for a time, thinking about using the beeper.

  But Lacy was right. If it went off, Nick would jump a mile. If he was driving, he could fly off the road and die.

  On the other hand … Rainey Teague.

  Awake.

  She was still trying to decide what to do when she noticed that someone was standing at the bottom of her lawn, down by the pines, half in the shade of the slender trees. A girl, a full-grown girl, not a child, her arms down at her side and staring up at the windows of the conservatory. Quite still, her expression solemn and remote.

  Kate set the phone aside and stood up, going around to the glass doors that opened onto the lawn. She stepped out on the edge of the grass, shading her eyes against the afternoon sun, looking at the girl, who was about a hundred feet away, just standing there. She was wearing a sundress, pale green, dappled with what looked like poppies or roses or maybe strawberries.

  Just like the girl in her dream.

  Or she was changing her memory to fit the girl, which people tended to do. She suppressed a superstitious shudder and stiffened herself. She wasn’t going to cower in her house like a frightened child.

  “Hello,” she called, opening the door and coming down the lawn, half afraid that she would frighten her away. “Are you lost, honey?”

  Kate was barefoot and she could feel the green grass, still moist from the rains, cool and wet between her toes. She was less than fifty feet away from the girl, who was looking at her with cool hazel-colored eyes, her full red lips slightly parted, as if she were … hun
gry. Now that she was nearer, Kate could see that the girl was old enough to have a full figure, curved and ripe and sensuous.

  The girl in her dream had been just a child.

  Hadn’t she?

  Kate was also close enough to see that the flowers on her pale green sundress were not flowers at all but stains, red irregular stains. She had seen enough pretty young women with those kinds of stains on them to know dried blood when she saw it.

  “What’s your name, honey? Has somebody hurt you? Come with me, we’ll get you all cleaned—”

  The girl—the young woman—turned away abruptly and stepped into the shade of the forest, a pale green flicker in the violet shadows.

  Dammit, thought Kate, looking at her bare feet. I can’t chase you in my bare feet.

  Kate paused there for a moment, trying to decide whether to go back to the house and get some shoes or just to plunge into the woods and get hold of the girl, who quite obviously needed help.

  There was nowhere for her to go in there, just the creek, which was full of slippery stones and mossy roots, and then the hill on the other side, which was much too steep to climb.

  “Honey, please come out of there, will you?”

  Kate saw a shape deep in the tree shadows. The girl was still in there, inside the woods, watching her. Waiting for her?

  Kate heard a voice that seemed to come from inside her own head—a familiar voice, although silent for years.

  Lenore’s voice.

  Kate, said her dead mother, don’t go in there.

  Unable to help herself, and angry at this sudden attack of female hysteria on her part, Kate spoke out loud.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Mom. I’m not a child.”

  And the answer came back, in a voice less like her mother’s and more like her own.

  Neither is that.

  Byron Deitz Motivates His People

  Deitz was waiting in the fading sunlight outside Kwikky Kleen Kar Kare on Long Reach Boulevard, watching the Tulip River, at full flood, boiling past the muddy banks, the broad back of the river mud brown, the surface of it rippling and roiling with the current.