by Peter Clines
“Why?” said Debbie. “Do you think the stories were supposed to be some kind of warning? A way to prepare people?”
Tim shook his head. “They probably weren’t anything. I think Whip just needed to get stuff off his chest and his overly-bright grandson seemed like a good target.”
Nate nodded. “Smart enough to talk to, but he wouldn’t tell people Whipple was mad. He’d just assume it was all stories.”
“So would everyone else,” said Xela.
“What about 14?” asked Clive. “Do we know anything else about that?”
Nate shook his head. “Right now Roger’s idea, that it’s a counterweight of sorts, is our best theory.”
Debbie coughed. “What about Mrs. Knight?”
“I checked in her apartment last night,” said Tim. “There’s no messages on her machine. From a few things I saw, I don’t think she had a job or any immediate family. No one’s missing her. I don’t want to sound harsh but...that’s good for us.”
Debbie studied a board near her feet.
“I also found a big bag of dry cat food and slashed it up with a knife. It looks like the cats got hungry and ripped into it. For the record,” Tim said to Debbie, “those cats were not going to starve. They’re both almost round, they’re so fat.”
She glanced up and smiled at him, but it looked forced. “Thank you,” she said.
Veek tilted her head. “Are you worried about leaving fingerprints or DNA or something in there?”
“No. Even if I had, which I didn’t, they won’t be looking for anything like that. It’s not a crime scene, just an abandoned apartment.”
“Did something happen to Mrs. Knight?” asked Mandy.
Debbie looked at the board again. Tim gave Nate a small shake of the head.
“It’s complicated,” said Nate. “She went away for a while.”
Mandy rolled the answer around in her head. “Because of what y’all were doing?”
“Yes,” said Debbie. The edge on her voice was a razor now. “Because of what we were doing.”
Mandy flinched a bit, but nodded. Nate got the impression she accepted the story because Debbie had been a little too mean with her answer. He looked over at Andrew to see if he accepted it, too.
Andrew didn’t look like he’d even heard them. He was fondling his water bottle and blinking out Morse code gibberish. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Pardon me again. I just want to be sure I understand you.” He looked down at the planks of the sun deck and then at the oversized machine room for the elevator. “You’re saying this entire building is Koturovic’s machine? We’re living in the machine?”
“That’s right,” said Tim. “It’s one big machine that they disguised as a building. Renting it out to people like us is part of the trick.”
“And Clive and Deborah’s apartment is the control center for this machine?”
Clive nodded.
Andrew’s head tipped side to side. “Fascinating,” he said.
Tim smiled at this and raised his bottle. “To Aleksander Koturovic,” he said. “He saved the world and no one ever knew.”
“To Aleksander,” said Nate.
They echoed the toast, even Debbie. Andrew looked confused for a moment and then raised his water with a wide smile.
The sky turned orange and they watched the sunset together.
Sixty Four
The man named Carmichael had been watching Tim Farr for close to two months at this point. He had the three-month mark clear in sight. Hopefully they wouldn’t keep him on for two pulls. Once or thrice a week it crept into his mind that Farr could be his assignment for the foreseeable future. Which could suck on a number of levels. The man was flagged for eighteen months of observation and five years of monitoring.
Some people thought observation was a sweet gig, but not Carmichael. A full year in the car would drive him nuts. He hadn’t signed up to keep eyes on retired clerks and analysts who got sacked. Granted, they didn’t put clerks and analysts under observation. There was a reason men like Farr rated so much attention.
Carmichael was jotting notes in the logbook when he noticed the group on the far side of the street. After six weeks, he knew all the residents of this stretch of road. He’d never seen any of the people in this group before. Four men. He could see them from across the street. They were nondescript, Mediterranean or eastern European from what he could see. One of them was a bruiser dressed in a gym-gray hoodie, pulled low enough to shadow his face. Heavy clothes for June, but he might be a tagger. There were more than a couple of them in this neighborhood.
The group stopped outside the Kavach building. A moment later two more men and two women walked down the hill and joined them. They had the same pale, vaguely Slavic look to them.
He switched to the laptop and typed in some quick notes about the group. Real-time analysts waited on the other end of the encrypted link, even at eight-forty-seven on a Friday. Anything even slightly suspicious went straight to them.
Carmichael glanced up from the computer. Someone had come out of the building. Andrew Waite, the Bible-thumper. His background check was so clean it was creepy. He waved to the group at the bottom of the steps—a group that had grown to over a dozen while Carmichael typed—and they waved back. One of them called him by name and he walked down to open the gate.
The other thing Carmichael saw was the old woman working her way around the front of his Taurus. Her round body was draped in a sun dress and oversized cardigan, and she wore a wide hat that could’ve been made from a small umbrella. She squeezed between his car and the truck in front of him and waddled up toward the driver’s window.
He had to deal with the locals at least once a week. The old woman would ask for directions or ask him to move or offer to sell him something. Fruit or pirated movies or bedroom comforters. It was some cultural thing he couldn’t wrap his head around. He set the computer down on the passenger seat and prepared to receive her.
The old woman cleared her throat. It was a wet, phlegmy sound. “Excuse me,” she said in accented English. “I’m so sorry, but could I bother you for directions? I seem to be lost.”
“I don’t live around here,” he said. He made sure the laptop was steady and then gave the woman a lazy glance. “I wish I could help you out, but you’re better off asking over at the corner...”
The old woman wore a Halloween mask. Then she blinked and Carmichael thought it had to be prosthetics. By the time he admitted her face was real and fumbled for his sidearm she’d already reached in through the open window and crushed his windpipe. He struggled for a moment, got the pistol up, and she slammed his head into the steering wheel. She slammed it three more times before the airbag went off in an explosion of white streaked with bright red. It pinned Carmichael’s body in place against the driver’s seat.
“Auntie,” called Andrew from across the street. “Are you all done? We don’t want to be late.”
“Coming, dearest,” said the old woman. She tugged her hand free and gave it a delicate shake. “Just tidying up a bit first.”
* * *
“Maybe we should move,” said Debbie.
Clive found himself craving a drink. He’d wanted one since the day they opened apartment 14. To be honest, he wanted to get sloppy drunk like the good old days, before he’d met Debbie, when he could forget whole weekends.
But those days hadn’t been all that good.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
Debbie shrugged. “Move. Find another place. We always wanted to someday.”
“Someday when you were done with school or I had a steady gig on a show,” he said. “We can’t afford it right now.”
“We could make it work.”
Clive shook his head. “Where would we find another place like this, at this price? We’d be lucky to get a little studio, and it’d probably be way out in the valley.”
“The valley’s not so bad.”
“You’d spend an extra two hours every day on th
e bus. You hate the ride as it is.”
She crossed her arms. After five years together, Clive knew that wasn’t a good sign. He reached out and took her hand. His fingers slipped between hers. “Come on,” he said. “What’s going on?”
She glared at him.
He nodded. “Mrs. Knight?”
“Mrs. Knight, the thing in our walls, the thing across the hall. All of it.” She waved her hand out toward room 14 and at their loft. Everyone had helped Clive move it away from the swiveling planks and closer to the coffin-lock. He’d added a handful of new diagonals to steady it now that it was free-standing.
He rubbed her fingers with his thumb and eased her arms open. “Still,” he said, “it’s better than what Nate found in his walls.” He gave her a little smile.
“See,” she said, “that’s what I’m worried about. Everyone’s just making jokes about death. There’s all this death here and we’re all pretending it’s not.” A wet spot formed in the corner of her eye and threatened to become a tear. “What if it had been you?”
“Ahhh,” he said.
“You reached into it.”
He nodded. “To save our friends.”
“But you could’ve died,” said Debbie. Her grip on his hand tightened and a matching wet spot swelled by her other eye. “You could’ve been sucked in like she was. And if you were gone they’d all just try to hide it. They wouldn’t even care.”
“Hey,” he said. “That’s not true. You know they’d care.”
“They don’t care about Mrs. Knight.”
He reached up and dabbed at the wet spots with his thumb, then wiped them on her nose. Her mouth formed a weak smile. “They do care,” said Clive. He kissed her knuckles and looked her straight in the eyes. “I’ve got to say something, and it’s going to sound mean, but I want you to hear me out. Okay?”
She nodded.
“We didn’t know Mrs. Knight,” he said. “She lived here. She wanted to learn about the place. But she was just a lady who lived down the hall.”
“That doesn’t mean we should—”
He set a gentle finger against her lips. “It doesn’t make it any less sad. But she wasn’t one of our friends and we didn’t know her. None of us did. Most of us just thought she was a nasty old woman with a racist streak. So did you.”
Debbie looked at the table top.
“We’re all upset about what happened to her. We all wish it hadn’t happened. But she was almost a stranger.” He paused. “They wouldn’t be like this if it had been me. They wouldn’t leave you alone like her cats. They’d be here. Nate would be making a play for you because you’re just too damned beautiful.”
She looked up. The wet spots were back. “Language.”
“Sorry.”
“Nate’s with Veek.”
“Well, yeah. No doubt about that after this week.”
She snorted out a laugh. Her free hand came up to wipe her eyes. “I love you, you know that?”
“I think it came up at the wedding.”
“Please don’t get killed by this place.”
He kissed her knuckles again. “I won’t. I promise.”
Someone pounded on the door and they both jumped at the sound. Clive smiled and gave his wife’s hand a squeeze. “You want to get it?”
“I’ve been crying,” she said. “And I’ve been awful to everyone.”
“You’ll get sympathy, then,” he said.
“Meanie.” She wiped her eyes and whoever was in the hall pounded again. It sounded urgent. She went to the door and peered through the peephole.
Andrew stood front and center. There were a few other people with him, but because of the fish-eye view she couldn’t be sure who they were.
Debbie spun the deadbolt and unhooked the safety chain. She opened the door and Andrew’s eyes tracked over to her face. She got a quick look at the other people and didn’t recognize any of them.
“Good evening, Deborah,” said Andrew. “I’m so very sorry about this.”
“What? Is there something—”
Andrew’s hand cracked across her jaw. He couldn’t bring himself to make a fist, but his backhand slap was still enough to send her staggering back into her apartment. He pushed the door open and moved after her. The others followed him in. An old woman in the back of the group closed the door behind them and twisted the deadbolt closed again.
Clive saw Debbie fall and leaped forward and Andrew swung another backhand. This time he made a fist. Clive’s head twisted on his neck. He’d been whacked in the head by a swinging two-by-four once. It hadn’t hit as hard as Andrew’s casual blow.
He tried to form another thought, white spots whirled in front of his eyes, and he was on the floor near Debbie. She blinked away her own surprise. Blood dripped from her nose and from a split in her upper lip.
Clive tried to roll back to his feet but one of the men pushed him back down. The man’s foot was wrong. Clive could feel the shape of it through the cheap sneaker and wondered if the man had a fake leg. Maybe a bionic fake leg.
Andrew stood over them. He held his off-color bible. He looked down on them the way someone looked down at a cat or a dog.
“To think that all this time,” he said, “you were living with the key to salvation and never knew it. That may be enough to make you one of the chosen, even though you’re not part of our congregation.”
The squat old woman worked her way through the group until she stood next to Andrew. Something was wrong with her face. It reminded Clive of embryo pictures where the mouth was nothing but a line and the eyes were still too large and far apart for the head. She blinked and it made him realize just how big her eyes were. The dull white of her eye blurred against the gray tone of her skin.
Andrew reached over and patted the old woman on the arm like a doting son. “This is Auntie Bradbury,” he said. “These are my spiritual brothers, Zebediah, Lucas, Charles, and Howard.”
They each bowed their heads as they were introduced. None of them spoke. All their eyes were wide and round, like Andrew’s.
“They’re all members of my congregation,” he explained. “You could say we’re a Family.”
Sixty Five
Tim felt it first.
He’d noticed the hum weeks ago. It was a subtle vibration, the kind you got on a plane or large ship. A hint that there were things going on under the floor.
When he felt the change, he knew it was something that’d been going on for ten or fifteen minutes. That was a bad sign. It used to be that nothing could sneak up on him.
The hum was a little faster, a little higher pitched. Just enough he was sure it’d changed.
The vibration was different, too. Since he first noticed it, the ever-so-faint tremble had been clean and steady. It synced with the hum. Now they’d fallen apart and become two distinct elements. The vibration was slowing and becoming less steady. It was more of a low thrum now, like a guitar. It was as if he could feel the pulse of the building, and the building was...
Tim’s mind snapped into crisis mode. He ran into his small bedroom, threw some shoes aside, and pulled a high-impact case from under the bed. Three combinations leaped to mind, a different one for each lock, and he spun the first dial.
* * *
Nate and Veek might have noticed sooner if they hadn’t been distracted in the kitchen and then on the futon couch. As it was, they became aware of the change at the same moment Tim was throwing open the case from under his bed.
Nate stood to drag his pants up and paused with his hand on the zipper. “Do you feel that?” he asked. “Like a...like a throbbing, kind of?”
Veek pulled her shirt over her head and smirked. “If you’re fishing for compliments, I think you got enough while we were—”
“No, seriously.” He gave his fly a quick tug, buttoned the jeans, and crouched next to Veek’s bare legs. She still wore her socks. He set his hand on the floor. “It feels like someone’s blasting their stereo downstairs.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
He shook his head. “Neither do I, but that sure feels like a big set of speakers.”
She set her own feet down and took a few quick steps to where her jeans had landed. The lights were out but the windows were wide open. “Yeah,” she said, “it does. What the heck is that?”
Nate grabbed his shirt from the kitchen floor. In his drying rack two glasses were trembling. They started to clatter against each other. “Is it an earthquake?”
“No,” she said, stepping into her pant legs. “If it was an earthquake it’d...” Her voice trailed off and her eyes went wide behind her glasses. “Oh, shit.”
Someone pounded on the door. Any harder and whoever it was would be trying to break the door down. They glanced at each other.
“Who is it?” shouted Nate.
“It’s Tim,” he hollered. “I think we’ve got a problem.”
* * *
Xela saw it next. Her headphones were in, and the pounding voice of Jessie J was blocking out all other sounds and sensations.
She was working on another painting of the building. This was her third in as many weeks, acrylics on canvas. For such a fascinating subject, she couldn’t come up with a way to picture it that didn’t feel trite or overused. The canvas in front of her was a mix of architecture lines and circuit boards. She’d been shooting for an optical illusion.
It looked like crap.
A wave of despair washed over her, but she managed to get above it. Art was her destiny. She knew it for a fact. She just needed to get past this creative block.
The light in her apartment shifted as the streetlights came on. There was one right by her front window that lit up her place at night. It was crappy yellow light, though, way too diffuse and scattered to be any good.