by James Renner
Jack gasped in surprise. His old friend stood before him, but there was little resemblance to the boy he once knew. Those wrinkles. That eyepatch. There was a nasty scar snaking out from under it. And he’d lost so much weight. He looked older than he should, as if he’d skipped forward ten years.
“Do I look that bad?” said Tony. He smiled wryly and shook his head. “Jesus, Jack. You brought everyone. Sam, Cole, the Captain … and a couple hundred red Chinese for good measure, I see.”
“And Nils,” said Jack.
“I saw. What’s wrong with him?”
“Morgellons,” said Cole.
“Damn it. Okay. Let me see what I can do.” He turned to leave.
“Wait,” said Jack. “Where the fuck are you going?”
Tony turned back to them. “They’ve got something that might help Nils. I have to go into the city. While I’m gone, you should gather everyone in the hangar. You’ve been placed in quarantine for a bit. Don’t worry. I’ll have food and water brought down. We’ll have you out in a day or two, tops. Procedure. There was a shipwreck back in the seventies. Someone brought measles. Wiped out a quarter of their population. I’ll be back.”
Before he left, his last eye found Sam. He nodded at her, then he disappeared out the door.
4 It was a long drive from Nevada to Big Indian Mountain, but Scopes didn’t mind. He loved traversing the country by highway. He loved the way the culture of America evolved from town to town. The more miles you traveled in a day, the easier it was to notice the quaint differences from one place to another. The way prairie dogs got fatter as you drove east. The way French dressing got sweeter the farther you went west. How people said “slippy” instead of “slippery” the closer you got to Pittsburgh. Or how, as you drove south, there were advertisements for “pop,” and then “soda,” and then, simply, “coke.” People were dangerous animals but also infinitely fascinating.
Also, Scopes liked his car. It was a 1964 Chrysler turbine, made the year of the Great Forgetting. The last mass-produced turbine-engine car in the world. It was quiet as the wind and could run on anything in a pinch: cooking oil, whiskey, Chanel No. 5. They don’t make ’em like they used to. How could they? They’d forgotten how. The radio was AM and he liked it that way. In the summers he could pick up ball games from Tallahassee to Akron. There was nothing more American than listening to a ball game in mono, the crack of the bat like a smack in the face.
He needed to talk to the Maestro, but he also needed time to figure out what to say. What Scopes had discovered lurking in the algorithm’s code was concerning. The Maestro was sneaking software patches into the resets, bits of code that targeted Jack and Tony and their friends. He was actually rewriting their memories as the group progressed, tweaking their personal backstories to motivate them. But motivation toward what end? For instance, what did drawing out a love affair between Jack and Sam and Tony have to do with the bigger picture?
It made Scopes nervous. Could be the Maestro had learned something about the human condition. Had he found another way?
It was time to confront the Maestro about what he knew, but for the first time Scopes was no longer sure that he was smarter than the old man in the mountain.
Scopes realized he was gripping the wheel too tightly. He had to control his anger by the time he got to Big Indian. The anger shamed him. Such a human emotion. He was better than that. More evolved.
He made himself remember Ambala. Her night music. And slowly he relaxed.
5 When Tony returned, he had no mask. He carried a wooden box, two inches square, inlaid with a dark design, like henna. The Chinese, who had gathered in the hangar, quieted and parted to let him through. He walked briskly to where Nils lay on the floor, and then kneeled beside his body and opened the box. Inside was a tar-like paste that smelled distinctly of treacle.
“What is it?” asked Sam who sat beside Nils’s head, a hand on his hair.
“Dodo juice,” said Tony. “Gunk from their stomach.”
“So there are still dodo here?” asked Cole, eyes wide.
Tony looked at the boy with his good eye. “There are all kind of things here,” he said. “On the other side of the mountain there’s a herd of triceratops.”
“Bullshit,” the Captain said.
Tony winked at him and then used his fingers to scoop out a glob of the ambergris.
“He can’t eat anything,” said Sam.
“It doesn’t go in his mouth.” Tony gently nudged Sam aside and straddled the Viking’s body. Then he distributed the black goo evenly between the fingers on both his hands and pushed them into Nils’s ears. He used the pads of his hands to squeeze the mess deep into the man’s ear canals. When he was finished, Tony pitched the box to the floor and stepped away from the body. “Back up a bit,” he said. “It works fast.”
Faster than anyone expected. As soon as Jack was out of the way, Nils opened his eyes. They were so shot with blood that all the white was red. He looked possessed, and in a very real way, Jack realized, he was. His breathing became ragged, lungs full of mucus. Then he sneezed. And sneezed. KA-CHOW! KA-CHOW! Again and again he sneezed. Finally, Nils sat up and, feeling another sneeze come on, squeezed his nose tight with two fingers. The force of the caged sneeze caused a thousand, ten thousand, a million fibers to erupt from his body simultaneously though the pores of his arms and legs and chest. Green fibers shot from his skin like gruesome party streamers. “Gaaaa!” said Nils. “That was so fucking gross!”
6 Since Tony had breached the quarantine, he was in with them for the night. He sat against the tin wall, and the others from Franklin Mills gathered around him in a tight semicircle. He felt awkward, insecure. There were things they should know and things they should not know, things they should never know. But they’d come so far for him. It moved him to tears.
“You’re a real sonofabitch,” said Jack.
“Fuckin’ asshole!” said Sam.
“You’re a great big asshat,” said Cole. “How long were you gonna let me rot in that loony bin?”
“One at a time,” he said, raising his hands in defense.
The Captain shook his head and said simply, “The fuck happened to your eye?”
“I’ve missed you, Captain,” he said. “So, yeah, the eye … uh … after I put Mark’s body in the lake, I borrowed his car. Drove it to the Gate House. Underneath Pymatuning I found a room with a weird vehicle, this thing called a water cart. Kind of like that log ride at Cedar Point? The one where you sit in the cart that gets pushed down the track by water? Like that, except the cart was sealed so the water couldn’t get in. Like a train car, kinda. I traveled three thousand miles down a tube of water. All the way to California. Or would have, if the track hadn’t blown up halfway through, I mean…”
* * *
Tony was dozing inside the water cart, rushing along the tunnel toward the West Coast, when it happened. It began with an odd sound. Like, if you were swimming underwater and someone cannonballed right next to you. A percussive, dull GOOOOOSHH, and suddenly the bullet-shaped four-seater car Tony was traveling in slowed as water rushed backward around it. It stopped for only a moment, and then he was being pulled faster down the tunnel. The water sloshed violently, bumping the cart against the Plexiglas tube. Tony tugged at his harness, pulling it tight around his chest. A second later, the water cart launched out of the tunnel through a giant gaping hole.
For a moment, he was weightless, falling through the black void, and then spotlights came on high above, painting his surroundings with a harsh yellow light, and Tony saw that he was falling into some abandoned city, between tall pylons that held the tunnel aloft over a street lined by brownstone apartments.
Impact! His whole body jolted forward, but before he could crush himself against the console, the cabin filled with pink foam that transferred his potential energy and converted it to kinetic waves within itself. It felt like Jell-O and smelled faintly of burned rubber. Just as Tony began to wonder if he might suf
focate, the windshield retracted and he came spilling out. He rolled away from the water cart inside a wave of foam that quickly dissolved into a pool of pink water.
Hesitantly, Tony stood. His mind reached out to his organs and extremities, to ascertain the location of any injury, but he found he was unharmed. Whatever that pink goop was, it was probably something we should not have forgotten.
He walked away from the spume of water falling from the blasted tube. More spotlights clicked on, responding to his progress, revealing the city in a hundred-foot radius around him.
Tony had never visited Europe, but he’d seen pictures of London on album covers, and that’s what this city looked like to him. An old city. Older than Cleveland. The apartments were made of hand-laid brick and rock and wood, packed so closely together he thought they might share common attics, like in those novels about children who wandered into other worlds. The street he was on ended at a great cathedral, the junction of rue Nibi and rue Giizis, according to the street sign on the corner.
He was about to call out. Call out “hello” or “hey” or something, when he heard the sound of running footsteps. His first thought was to hide. Hide behind the church or the side of that brownstone over there, but he didn’t know what he was running from and hadn’t he been about to call out for help anyway?
Spotlights clicked on around a corner, and as the sound of the running feet grew louder, Tony marked the person’s progress by the approaching lights. Then the lights and the noise and the runner turned the corner onto rue Nibi and Tony saw what it was.
Cole had described them, but still Tony was frightened by its appearance. The hair, all that hair, made the Hound look like a werewolf. Cole had warned him that they would come for him. This one wore two belts crisscrossed around its waist like some cowboy.
Tony ran for the church, but even before he got to the door, he knew it would be locked. And it was. He reached out for the brass aspen leaf knockers, but by then the Hound was at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at him.
“Come here,” the Hound whispered.
“What do you want?” Tony asked.
“Shhh!” the Hound said, looking around nervously. He waved at Tony to come down.
What else was there to do? Readying himself for a fight, Tony walked to the Hound.
“You blew up the tunnel,” Tony whispered.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re trying to get to Mu,” said the Hound. “I want to know why.”
Tony didn’t say anything.
“You can tell me or I can read your mind. Save me the trouble.”
“I have to stop the forgettings. Stop whoever is resetting the code.”
The Hound grunted.
“Why are we whispering?” asked Tony.
“Because things still live in the heart of this city.”
“What is this place?”
“Na’Duli,” said the Hound. “It was once the capital city of the Seven Nations. It’s irradiated now.”
“Irradiated?”
“Don’t worry. You can survive down here for quite a while.” The Hound motioned for him and turned back down rue Nibi. “Come.”
Tony didn’t move. He looked back down into the darkness where downtown must be. He thought about running.
“Bad idea,” the Hound whispered.
“I can’t let you erase my mind,” he said.
The Hound reached for him and that did it. Tony ran. He ran so fast down the dark street that he was at the edge of the spotlight’s cone before the next one clicked on. He ran for a quarter of a mile before he realized the Hound was not chasing him. The Hound remained by the cathedral, under a spotlight of its own, separated from Tony by the void between.
“What do you want?” Tony shouted, loud enough for his voice to cross the distance.
Suddenly the Hound was jumping and waving, signaling him back.
And that’s when he first heard it. A low rumble. The sound a rubber ball makes rolling down a flight of carpeted stairs. Except it sounded like a thousand rubber balls. A million. Tony looked behind him, into the dark heart of Na’Duli. A spotlight clicked on a half mile away, silhouetting a skyscraper that appeared to be something between an office building and a castle.
“Run!” yelled the Hound.
Tony obeyed. He ran back toward the Hound, who was already jogging back the way it had come.
That awful sound, that sound of some single-minded horde, grew louder and louder until Tony could feel the vibration in his jaws. Something hit his right leg and he almost fell onto the cobblestone street. “Don’t stop!” shouted the Hound.
He couldn’t flick it off. It was heavy. It clung to his jeans. Still running, he reached down. His fingers found thick, coarse hair and then something bit into his palm. A bright pain, full of needles. He screamed and stopped and yanked his hand away.
It was a rat. A fat rat the size of a cat, with blind, milky eyes. It hissed at him and dug its claws into the meat of his calf. Tony screamed again, and then the Hound pulled the monster off. It drop-kicked the rat down rue Nibi, back toward the rapidly approaching spotlights and the noise, toward the stampede.
“Faster!” said the Hound.
Tony followed, past more brownstones and then into a district of tall warehouses. Then he was hit again, this time in the square of his back, and he tumbled to the ground. The creature scampered over his exposed face, sensing where the vital bits were. Before he could grab it, the rat raked a talon up his left cheek and snagged its claws deep into his eyeball. It felt like someone had fired a gun into his brain. It was a pain he’d never experienced before. The pain enveloped him.
Distantly, he was aware of the Hound again. It punted this rat, too. Then the Hound picked Tony up. It draped Tony’s body over its wide shoulders and, quite unexpectedly, bounded into the air and onto the fire escape of a warehouse. It flew up the stairs as the rumble of the million rubber balls became a din of claws against brick. He listened to their squeaking as the creatures began to climb after them.
Five stories and they were on the roof. The Hound rolled Tony off its shoulders and onto the white gravel there. He took off one of the belts and wrapped it around Tony’s waist.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m saving your life,” the Hound said in a way that told Tony it was a little unsure of its own motives. “In a moment you’re going to appear in the back room of a bar, near Seattle. You tell the woman there … Listen! You tell her, ‘Scopes said to get me to a hospital.’ You got that? Tell her it’s a direct command from Scopes.”
“Why?”
“Because,” said Scopes. “You’re right. Something needs to change. But the people of Mu can’t help you. They’re the worst sort of humans. They’re pragmatists.”
The Hound pushed something into Tony’s hand. It was hard to concentrate, because his head screamed with such agony, but it felt like a belt buckle.
“You go to Mu. Go and see for yourself. When you’ve had enough of their talk, you can bring me over with this. And then we’ll fix it together.”
Scopes pushed a button on the belt wrapped around Tony’s body, and suddenly Tony was weightless.
* * *
“I woke up in the back of a bar in Ariel, Washington,” he said. “The woman who ran the place knew the Hounds. Husband was a Collector back in the day. She got me to the hospital. I gave them a fake name. Spent a month recovering. Lived out of a homeless shelter in Seattle until I got my mind right again. Then I made my way to Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutians. Hijacked a crab boat to get me here. This guy named Phil was the boat captain. He stayed here, too, once he saw what it was all about. You’d like him,” he said to the Captain. “Grumpy just like you.”
“What about the belt buckle?” asked Jack.
“Hmm?”
“The buckle the Hound gave you? What did you do with it?”
“Oh. I dunno. There’s a whole cache of those belts in Peshtigo. Nazi
s left behind all kinds of dangerous shit.”
“Okay,” said the Captain, “so what the fuck have you been doing for three years?”
“Well, first of all it’s been more like five years, not three. That’s how much the new forgettings have fucked with the calendar. You know they can reset only so many times until the seasons start to get all out of whack and then they have to leap forward like nine months to make it right again. But what have I been doing? I work. Yada yada yada … from each, according to their ability, you know? I talk to people about their problems. Listen to their stories.”
Cole was looking at Tony as if he were an alien.
“People here, they’ve got everything solved. Everything except boredom. The vitamins everyone takes allow them to live for hundreds of years, but, man, they’re so afraid of getting hurt outside the city, nobody ever leaves.”
“Did you even try to fix anything?” asked Jack.
Tony looked to his old friend. “Fuck you, okay? I tried. I did. But nobody wanted to help. And, you know, why leave? We’re safe here, Jack. We can stay right here forever and everything will be okay.”
“For you,” said the Captain. “But what about the six billion people who don’t live on Mu?”
Tony threw up his hands. “What do you want me to say? They’re fucked. They’re totally fucked. But they brought it on themselves, didn’t they?”
The Captain glared at him. “You’ve been given more chances than you deserve, you little snot. You’re indebted. To the world that took care of you after your dad went crazy. To the people who cleaned up your mess after you left. Understand? You pay it back because that’s the way it works. Sit back and watch the world go to shit? Nuts!”
“Dad,” said Jack, his voice calm, calming. “Easy.”
The Captain grunted and walked away.
7 A Native American fellow with a long ponytail arrived later that night in a big school bus filled with fruits and vegetables and dried fish. Jack and Zaharie organized a buffet, and while they served the passengers, Sam slipped away and walked the mile to the beach along the southern shore of Mu. She walked a narrow footpath to the sand, still warm from the sun even though it had set an hour ago. The grains smushed between her toes like moon dust.