Firewalkers

by Chris Roberson

  After putting the grocery bags on the kitchen counter next to the supplies he’d already brought inside, Patrick headed back to the car to get the next load.

  He was carrying in the bottles of wine that he’d got at the grocery store and the rum he’d picked up at the liquor store when a Volkswagen Beetle pulled up beside him, with Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” blaring from the car stereo.

  “Have I come to the right place for the zombie-hunter slumber party?” Joyce called out over the din from the stereo speakers, leaning out the open driver-side window. “I brought my fuzzy pajamas.”

  “Very funny,” Patrick dead-panned. He hefted the wine. “I got your order.”

  “Good thing.” She turned and lifted up a reusable bottle bag that had been sitting on the passenger seat beside her. “I picked up a few bottles, too, just to be on the safe side.”

  She drove past Patrick’s car, rolling up the window as she went, and parked by the curb. Patrick waited on the sidewalk as she climbed out, leaning heavily on her cane. She was wearing her leather jacket over a Joy Division t-shirt, faded denim jeans, and a pair of bright-pink eight-holed Doc Martens boots.

  “Want some help with that?” Patrick asked as she reached into the back seat.

  Joyce straightened up and shrugged. “Sounds good to me.”

  Leaving the rest of her things in the car, she pulled a single bottle of wine out of the bag from the passenger seat, and then turned and simply walked toward the open front door of the house, leaving her car door standing open. As she walked inside, she glanced back over her shoulder at him and smiled.

  “Just be sure to lock it up when you’re done.” She held up the bottle of wine, waggling it back and forth. “I’m going to have a drink.”

  Patrick smiled as he set his load of bottles down on his front steps and went to fetch Joyce’s things from the car. Then he felt a chill, and glanced up at the darkening sky overhead. He knew that they were probably safe here, but he didn’t want to be out in the open any longer than he had to be. He hurried to pull the bags from the Volkswagen so he could get back inside as quickly as possible. It was almost as if he could feel eyes on him, watching from the shadows.

  As Patrick worked in the kitchen, browning the cubes of chuck roast before stirring in onion and garlic, he could hear the sound of Izzie and Daphne walking across the floor upstairs, back and forth, no doubt moving boxes and shifting old furniture. On the other side of the kitchen wall he could hear Joyce’s cane tonking on the floor as she went about unpacking her things in his bedroom. His intention was that he would offer to sleep on the couch while she took his bed, thinking it forward to assume that they would share a bed again just because circumstances had forced them to do so the night before in the abandoned lighthouse. Or maybe he was just overthinking things.

  Patrick added diced potatoes, chopped carrots, tomato sauce, and chicken stock, then seasoned the pot liberally with salt and pepper. He was putting the cover on the pot when Joyce came in from the other room, holding a half-empty glass of wine in one hand, leaning heavily on her cane with the other.

  “Smells good,” she said, sniffing the air.

  “It’s my mom’s recipe,” Patrick answered, washing his hands in the sink. “Pretty standard island style.”

  “My mother was a horrible cook.” Joyce shrugged. “So at least I come by it honestly.”

  “What?” Patrick dried his hands on a dish towel. “Don’t enjoy cooking?”

  She shook her head, miming a shudder with her lips pursed in a moue of distaste. “Not really. I mean, I do cook. You can’t eat out every meal, right?”

  “You could try.”

  “Not on my salary.” Joyce circled the kitchen, heading toward the open bottle of wine she’d left on the counter earlier. She poured herself a full glass, and shrugged. “So I cook when I have to. Just very badly, is all.”

  Patrick fetched a tumbler from the cabinet and reached for the wine bottle. “Mind if I . . . ?” He glanced in Joyce’s direction.

  “Be my guest,” she said, with a welcoming gesture like a hostess showing a restaurant patron to their table.

  “I’m a decent cook at best,” Patrick admitted as he splashed wine into the tumbler. “But I had good teachers.”

  Joyce leaned over the stove and took in a deep breath through her nostrils.

  “I didn’t think I was all that hungry, but smelling this . . . ?” She turned to look back over her shoulder at him. “I think I could just about eat the whole pot by myself.”

  “Well, don’t get too eager,” Patrick said, leaning his hip against the counter and taking a sip of the wine. “It needs to stew for at least another hour. My mother would smack me with a wooden spoon for cooking it even that quickly. She’d start a pot of stew simmering over a low flame in the morning and wouldn’t let anyone touch it until sundown. The house was filled with the smell of her cooking almost every day, for hours and hours.”

  He put the tumbler down on the counter and bent down to pull another pan out of the cupboard.

  “I usually serve the stew over rice, if that’s okay with everybody.” He set the pan next to the sink and then headed for the pantry to get out a bag of rice.

  “Your slumber party, your rules,” Joyce said, raising her glass and smiling.

  Patrick put the rice and the empty pan on the counter, and set a timer on his phone to remind him to start the rice cooking when the stew was almost finished. Then he picked up his tumbler from the counter and nodded toward the living room.

  “Let’s go sit down. I want to hear about these test results you were talking about.”

  “Right.” The smile faded from Joyce’s face, and a more serious expression settled into place. She nodded toward the wine bottle as she walked to the door, her cane tonking against the kitchen floor like a drumbeat with each step. “Bring the wine. We’re going to need it, I think.”

  Joyce was joining Patrick on the couch, having gone to grab some files from her bag in his bedroom, when they could hear the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs, and Izzie and Daphne rounded the corner, each of them carrying shopping bags.

  “What’s that?” Patrick glanced at the bag Izzie was carrying.

  “Arts and crafts,” Daphne answered for her.

  Izzie elbowed her in the ribs and then dropped the bag on the far end of the coffee table. “I’ll explain after we eat. I’m starving.”

  “And here I thought I was the one obsessed with food,” Patrick said, smirking.

  “I forgot to eat, okay?” Izzie rolled her eyes. “And I could smell whatever that is in the kitchen all the way from upstairs, which only made matters worse.”

  “Well, you’ll have to wait, I’m afraid,” Patrick answered. “Needs to simmer for a while longer.”

  “I could settle for that in the meantime.” Daphne pointed at the wine bottle on the coffee table.

  Izzie started for the kitchen, waving Daphne toward an empty chair.

  “Sit,” she said, “I’ll get us a couple of glasses.”

  As she eased into the chair with a weary sigh, Daphne turned to Patrick and Joyce. “It doesn’t seem like anyone tried to kill either of you today, then?”

  Patrick sat forward, raising an eyebrow.

  “I’ll take that as a no.” Daphne glanced over at the kitchen door. “Izzie says that she nearly got run over by a truck in the street, right in front of the RA offices.”

  “Did she get the plates?” Patrick asked, putting his glass down on the coffee table. “I could run them through the system and see if . . .”

  He trailed off when Daphne shook her head, lips pursed.

  “No markings, either,” she went on. “She did get the plates of a car she thought was being used as a spotter up the street, that took off as soon as the truck drove by.”

  “But when I ran the license number I came up empty,” Izzie said as she walked back into the room from the kitchen carrying a glass in either hand. “Stolen last month
from an old guy down in San Diego.”

  She put the glasses down on the table, filled each from the wine bottle, then handed one to Daphne and carried the other to the only remaining chair in the room.

  “But you think this spotter was involved in all of this?” Joyce asked, looking worried. “That they were targeting you specifically?”

  “It tracks.” Izzie took a sip of wine, and lifted her shoulders in a slight shrug. “If Zotovic and his people know that we’re onto them, a hit-and-run would be a good way of getting rid of one of us. Even if he does have people that can walk around in the daylight, Ridden or otherwise, they can’t just go around killing federal agents in the street without raising a few eyebrows. But a garden-variety traffic accident? That’s a little easier to get away with.”

  “I did some digging on Zotovic’s background,” Patrick said, leaning back on the couch. “News accounts, public records, law enforcement databases, you name it.”

  “Find anything useful?” Izzie asked. “Or interesting, at least.”

  “Not really.” Patrick shook his head. “Only that he is part of a secret cabal of lizard people using phone apps to brainwash the human population.”

  All three women turned and gave him confused looks.

  “A nutty conspiracy theory I found on the internet,” he said. “Total waste of time.”

  “A week ago, that’s what I would have thought about this.” Joyce leaned over and bent down, to pick up the files that she’d brought over from the bedroom. “After everything that’s happened the last few days, though . . . ?”

  “This is about the stuff you found under Tyler Campbell’s fingernails?” Patrick asked.

  “Yep.” Joyce nodded.

  “That was the drug dealer I was telling you about,” Izzie said, turning to Daphne. “The one whose body Patrick took me to see the first day I was in town.”

  “I remember,” Daphne shot back, and then looked back to Joyce. “So was it Ink? Under the dead man’s nails?”

  “That’s a little hard to say,” Joyce answered, “given that we’ve never had a verifiable sample of Ink that we could compare it to. But then, it’s easier to say what that stuff isn’t than what it is.”

  “Mind clarifying that?” Patrick asked, and then hastened to add, “In layman’s terms, please.”

  Joyce took a deep breath and let out a ragged sigh.

  “The lab techs thought that this was a prank,” she said. “Or some kind of test. I think they’re still waiting to see if I show up to deliver the punch line, or give them gold stars for passing with flying colors. You see, the thing is, the stuff that I sent them to test didn’t turn out to be anything.”

  Patrick looked around the room, and saw that the others were just as perplexed as he was.

  “You mean it vanished?” he asked.

  “No, it was still there,” Joyce answered with a shake of her head. “It just . . . wasn’t anything. They were completely unable to identify its chemical makeup. The stuff was completely non-reactive. Its surface texture was completely featureless, even under an electron microscope. They even put a small sample of it into a mass spectrometer, and all that they were able to prove conclusively was that it had mass. The electrons just passed right through it. Heck, it had volume, but it didn’t appear to have any appreciable weight.”

  Something was itching at the back of Patrick’s thoughts, an echo of something that he’d heard recently.

  “So why did they think it was a prank?” Izzie asked.

  “Because after spending three days wracking their brains trying to figure out what the stuff was,” Joyce answered, “the other night one of the techs left the sample sitting on a workbench under a window, and when he came back the next morning . . .”

  “It was gone,” Izzie finished for her.

  Joyce nodded. “They think I had someone come in and switch out the sample trays in the night, just to mess with them. They’ve got a small wager going about what was really in that sample that I sent them, and they want me to fess up so they can settle the bet.”

  Patrick’s brow was furrowed as he rummaged through his memories, trying to find the one that echoed what Joyce had said.

  “I’m guessing that there was sunlight through the window?” Daphne asked.

  “That’s my thinking, yeah.” Joyce put the file on the coffee table and reached for her wine glass. “The stuff was buried pretty deep under Campbell’s nails, which were pretty grimy, so it’s possible that was the first time the sample had been exposed to daylight.”

  “Weakly interacting particles . . .” Patrick finally said under his breath.

  The others turned to look in his direction.

  “You remember what Professor Kono told us the other day?” Patrick asked Izzie. “About what Undersight was designed to look for?”

  “The leaked gravity stuff, you mean?” Izzie said, and then turned to Daphne and Joyce. “Nicholas Fuller had this idea that gravity is weaker than the other forces like magnetism because most of the gravity is leaking out into the higher dimensions.”

  “No, that’s not what I’m thinking of.” Patrick shook his head. “Or not exactly, anyway. I meant the type of matter that should be there but that we don’t detect.” He thought for a moment, knowing it was on the tip of his tongue. “Dark matter.”

  “Oh, right,” Izzie said. “And there was dark energy, too. But Fuller thought they were all part of the same phenomenon. The missing energy, the missing matter, the missing gravity . . . all of it the result of the higher dimensions.”

  “Wait, I’ve read a few articles about dark matter,” Joyce said. “I thought the whole point of it was that we couldn’t detect it, we just see its effects. Like, we wouldn’t be able to see it, even if we were looking at it, because it doesn’t emit or absorb light. Right?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Patrick said, feeling out of his depth. “But maybe . . . I don’t know, maybe whatever this stuff is, it shares similar properties?”

  “It certainly lines up with what we know about Fuller’s research.” Izzie had her hand on her chin, a thoughtful expression on her face. “I don’t know that any of that helps us any, in practical terms, but I guess it gives us a little bit of a better idea what we’re dealing with.”

  Daphne had finished off her first glass of wine, and reached to grab the bottle on the table. “I think the real question is . . .” She paused, and then hefted the empty bottle. “The real question is, do we have any more wine?”

  “Just a second.” Patrick hopped up from the couch and walked to the kitchen. He picked a bottle of decent pinot noir, and then fished around in the drawer until he found his corkscrew.

  He couldn’t quite hear what they were saying in the living room, but when he came back in carrying the open wine bottle, the conversation stopped suddenly and all three women turned to look at him with abashed expressions on their faces. Izzie even held her hand over her mouth as she stifled a laugh.

  “What?” Patrick couldn’t quite keep a note of defensiveness from creeping into his voice. He walked over and handed Daphne the bottle. “Seriously, what?”

  “It’s nothing,” Joyce said quickly, fighting a smile. “Let’s get back to it. Daphne, you were saying?”

  “Well, I did some checking today, made some calls from my apartment, that kind of thing.” Daphne finished filling her glass almost to the rim, and then set the bottle on the table. “Through the course of a few different investigations, I’ve gotten to know people at city works, and the Recondito Bureau of Transportation, and a few other city agencies. And I wanted to find out if anything about last night had been picked up on automated surveillance systems. Traffic cameras, security feeds, that kind of thing. Because I just couldn’t accept the fact that there hadn’t been anything in the news or online or anywhere today about all of those . . . those people filling the streets last night.”

  “And?” Patrick asked.

  “Nothing. Not. A. Thing.” Daphne took a sip of wine, an
d eyes looking out over the top of her glass, added in a mock casual tone, “But I did learn something interesting, though.”

  She paused, looking around the room, as if for dramatic effect.

  “Just tell us already,” Izzie said, reaching over and kicking Daphne’s foot.

  “Okay, okay.” She lowered the glass and held it in both hands in her lap. “One of my contacts with the Bureau of Transportation was complaining about still getting used to this new software that they’d just upgraded on all their computers. And then a guy I know at City Works mentioned that they’d just had to install some new software on their computers, too. I started asking around, and it turns out that it was a city-wide initiative spearheaded by the mayor’s office, supposedly to increase efficiency and eliminate budgetary overruns, by standardizing the computer systems across different departments. So all of the software that controls the traffic cameras, security feeds, alarm monitoring systems, you name it . . . it’s all been upgraded this year. And want to guess what company made all of that new software?”

  “Parasol, obviously,” Izzie said.

  “Oh.” Daphne deflated, a disappointed expression on her face. “I didn’t think it was obvious.”

  “Not when you were doing the investigating, no,” Izzie answered, conciliatory. “But the fact that you’re telling us in this dramatic fashion, like the answer is going to surprise us. . . . With that kind of set up, of course the software that you’ve found out about would turn out to be made by the software company that’s been on all of our minds this whole time.”