by Tim Scott
But I slid down my underwear. “What does it say?” I said quietly.
There was a prickling pause.
“The Dream Virus Project,” said Mat finally, and I heard the tension breaking his voice up.
“Jesus,” said the overweight guy, and the empty, shocked silence that followed said all I needed to know. My head almost broke open with emotion, because I sensed I had crossed a line in the sand and was on the way home, finally.
Even though I didn’t understand it at all yet, I knew that events had an unstoppable momentum all their own, that I could ride without looking back.
I was Exodus.
I had told these guys to do this myself, although I had absolutely no memory of it. The Rasta exploded into a smile again. “I knew I liked you, Moose. You’re as mad as hell. Fucking hell, Moose! You got us to steal your own house! What was all that about?”
“Not sure exactly,” I said, breathing with relief and pulling my clothes back on. “But I know where to find out.”
“Good! That’s good!”
“Take my house to this place,” I said, scribbling down the name of a cove Mat and I had been to on trips to Baja.
“It’s the north end of Isla Todos Santos,” I said, aware this whole idea had no real logic to it, but things were falling into place and this was one of them. I just had to trust myself when things felt right, and this felt like the thing to be doing.
“Is my bike still in the garage?”
“Guess so.”
“Good. We’ll meet you at that place as soon as we can. Now, you’d better get moving.”
“OK, OK, sure you wouldn’t like a cookie? John’s been busy with them all day.”
“OK,” I said, fizzing with adrenaline. “Let’s have a cookie.”
“This is classic, Moose! Classic!” said the Rasta, passing over a plateful. “You are one weird person, and I like that. I knew I liked you!”
“Dark,” said Mat, shaking his head as he ate his chocolate chip cookie. “I’m hoping you have some idea of what is going on now, Jonny, because otherwise I suggest we go to Hawaii forever.”
“Yeah. We need to get over to see Habakkuk, but I don’t know whose side he’s on in this. So be ready, OK?”
“For what?” Mat said.
“Beats me. But I guess you’ll know if it happens.”
There was a knock at the door and we all froze. The Rastamade a pressing-down sort of gesture with his outstretched palms that I took to mean “Keep quiet,” then tiptoed rather pointlessly over to the door before opening it as gingerly as before. I noticed the overweight guy had sheepishly sidled out of sight behind a pillar. There was a familiar and wildly out-of-place voice.
“Can I see Jonny, please?” said Teb, like an eight-year-old wanting to know if the neighbor would like to come out to play.
“Jonny. Hi!” said Teb, bustling in red-faced and breathless. “I’ve been through the file. I don’t exactly understand it, but my feeling is, Habakkuk does, and he will try and kill you.”
“Wow!” said the Rasta, “that’s one bad messenger. Here, Moose, you’d better take my gun.” And he tossed me a pistol with an overlong golden barrel.
I looked at him.
“So I like gold,” he said with a smile.
43
I understood now why Habakkuk had not hounded me over my absence from work. I was guessing he knew about all this—or at least he knew about some of it. Maybe he had been even partly to blame for the insane events, but for what possible reason I had no idea other than it was something to do with that file. I swung the bike into the Nineteen Seventies Zone, which meant we were only three blocks from the EasyDreams office, and my brain felt like it was so fired up every cell had its own separate opinion. I hadn’t even looked at the wedding photos the Rasta had been going on about, but never mind. Maybe subconsciously, I hadn’t wanted to anyway, in case I was wrong—and I really didn’t want to be wrong now.
I tried to nail my feelings down, to stop them from slopping about in the massive soup of adrenaline that was washing through me. The Dream Virus Project had to be the key. That’s what linked Habakkuk, my house, and the Riders; it seemed obvious, although the details in my head were sketchy as hell. The Riders had gone on about an airborne Dream Virus that could find one specific person and trigger the same dream night after night; that was crazy, but what seemed to be happening to me was all one step beyond even that. What would I say to Habakkuk exactly? “Hello. What the fuck have you done to my head?”
There again, if he knew nothing about this, he was going to shovel work-related grief down my neck faster than even your average anaconda could swallow. Well, let him, I thought, revving the bike across a junction with Mat and Teb on the back. What did I care? My job and my dream architect clients seemed so far removed from anything that meant anything that I could live with losing all of that.
But there was something else. I was nervous about meeting Habakkuk, and it wasn’t just Teb’s weird warning. Some undefined thing was gnawing away at me about him, and I couldn’t sense what it was. We passed a group of office staff trolling down the sidewalk in silver flares and wide-collared shirts, and I began to feel a cordial of tension slither through me. I was about to open a Pandora’s box and Pandora had spent far more time packing this one than the one you read about in the classics. What was I going to find at the office?
Some bizarre connection in my head suddenly made me think about those tweed-clad Victorian archaeologists, sweating in the dark with their flaming torches in the airless stone chambers on the outskirts of Cairo, about to prize open an Egyptian tomb with worn metal tools, unsure whether they would find dusty skeletons or twinkling treasures in the sarcophagus beyond.
I tried to breathe deeply and retain some sort of logic in my head; I didn’t want to blunder into his office like a bull in a china shop—or indeed, like any kind of dairy animal visiting any sort of consumer outlet.
We weaved on through the traffic, sliding by a heap of massive textured-concrete slabs that were pitted with slanting windows and looked vaguely like a twentieth-century concrete gun emplacement that had been mistakenly built out of jelly and immediately begun to melt. This 1970s-style building was the head office of the S.C. Cookery Vets Practice. They were essentially vets and tried to save pet animals, but as a last resort—if they had to put them down—they cooked them on the spot into a special commemorative meal for the owner.
I flicked the machine between a couple of other bikes—some Flat Iron Guns and a Crossfield 23M—but my thoughts were still wildly jumpy, going off like firecrackers in my head. What the hell was I going to find? And why did I have a terrible lung-aching, hollow-stomached, dry-throat feeling that Habakkuk was setting me up? The dream about him suddenly spun back to me, and I pictured his face laughing from the top of the crevasse. That had been one unsettling dream, and maybe that was the root of my unease.
We were only a block away from the EasyDreams office. The company felt that the Nineteen Seventies Zone gave it some kind of retrocredibility that dream clients of all ages were comfortable with. They claimed it was good marketing, and maybe they were right; or maybe it was all part of creating a nice little easy-money marketing job for themselves.
Up ahead, I could now see the building, flashing with reflective glass and twirled in steel, rising like some giant, organic thing. It wasn’t exactly 1970s in style, but that was frankly a godsend, because it freed the place up from having to look terrible.
I pulled in to the bike lot, throttled right down, and snuck into a parking space. Glancing around, I saw that too many of the familiar bikes that should be there were missing, and I didn’t have a good feeling about that.
Where was everyone?
The three crash suits undid with a whirr, and as we all slipped off I realized it was a balmy late afternoon and the sun was still drifting in between the buildings, so that I could feel its reassuring warmth across on my back. I breathed in deeply.
T
his was it. This was fucking it.
We walked quickly over to the arched front doors without saying a word, my legs moving a little quicker than I intended, as though they just couldn’t wait to take me to see what was going on. As we slipped into the foyer, I realized I didn’t have any kind of ID and Teb had masked our C-4 Charlies so we could get into Zone Traffic Securities. I prepared myself for a battle with the girl at the desk.
She was engrossed, as nearly always, with painting her nails. Those nails must have had more coats of paint on them than the Bay Bridge, I thought. Her painting output would have rivaled Gauguin and Matisse put together if she had chosen to paint canvases instead of just her nails.
She half-looked up with a disinterested sneer as we approached, but didn’t say anything and her eyes wandered away from us as we got closer, as though it was inconceivable we were actually going to want to speak to her.
“Hi, Karen,” I began, wondering what the best way was to tackle this. “I’ve worked in EasyDreams for seven years, okay? But my C-4 Charlie is acting up.” She slanted her eyes toward us and carried on dabbing her nails.
“One moment,” she said eventually, with enough disinterest to kill a cat at fifty yards, but made no move to do anything. The three of us exchanged glances and stood, marooned in the silence that followed, feeling as helpless as if we had been abandoned unexpectedly in the middle of a remote colony of puffins.
Finally, she plonked the tiny brush back into the bottle of nail polish, slipped off her chair, and disappeared through a door behind her, clacking her heels across the hard floor. She returned moments later with several plastic wristbands. “Three passes. Can you sign for them here?” She slid over a SignatPad, and managed to convey with her manner just how much trouble she felt we had put her to and how the next time she would probably have to call in the army for this kind of misdemeanor.
“Thank you,” said Mat with an impressive amount of charm under the circumstances, and we all signed, one after the other in flourishing scrawls, then bounded into a waiting elevator.
“EasyDreams,” I said, feeling the strange familiarity of being back here again, as though it was any other day at work. Except, while everything here was the same, now I was like a spectator looking in from the outside instead of being an integral part of it.
“Knock, knock,” said the elevator.
“What?” said Teb.
“Knock, knock,” said the elevator again.
“Oh! Let’s just use the stairs,” I said, not having the patience to be screwed about by an elevator again.
I headed out and toward the first flight, without waiting.
Mat was close behind while Teb did his best, but his diet of doughnuts left him straggling, and I decided we might as well let him get there in his own time. So I pressed on ahead.
“Wait!” I heard the elevator cry. “Wait! Please. It’s just a joke,” it went on, its voice fading as we thwick-twacked through a set of double doors.
It was four flights, and I began bouncing up them, happy to be free from a time-on-its-hands elevator and a receptionist who felt her whole job was a flagrant imposition on her leisure time.
I hadn’t used the stairs for years, and clearly not many other people had either; they felt foreign and were dusty as hell, echoing the noise we made like some yawning crevasse. I got a flashback of that feeling I’d had in the ice with Jack. Fire escape staircases are alien territory, I thought, and no place for humans.
We reached the second floor as Mat came up alongside me, leaping two treads at a time, and suddenly the idea that I had arranged for my own house to be stolen came back to me with a wild jolt. How could that have happened? Was I really the Exodus they had been waiting for? What had blocked out such a chunk of memory that I could have no recollection of it? One more floor, and tension rose through my chest again as a lash of nervousness ran across my neck. I sprinted up the last few steps and clattered through the double doors to the fourth-floor landing, heading straight for the main doors of EasyDreams. If Habakkuk knew we were coming, the less time he had to prepare the better. I walked brazenly into the open-plan atrium at a fast walk, expecting to skip across the bustling floor and straight to Habakkuk’s office on the far side, but I broke my stride almost immediately.
The place was utterly quiet, and incomprehensibly dark.
Like a forgotten Egyptian tomb.
44
I heard a spectacular clatter as Mat went headlong into a potted plant in the achingly black room, and it occurred to me that if you really want to stop an invading army, you just had to put a lot of potted plants and knee-high coffee tables in their path, then see how far they got with their night assault. They’d be too busy rubbing their shins to do anything.
“Have we got the right floor, Jonny?” Mat hissed as he pulled himself up on my left arm.
“Yes, right floor, but probably the wrong universe or something. It’s not Sunday, is it?” I said, realizing I was speaking in a half whisper as well, for reasons that were beyond me. We both stood hovering there stupidly and I tried to think of a possible explanation. Habakkuk was fastidious about people working the correct number of hours, meeting deadlines, and that sort of thing. He could be incredibly dull about it, so to close the office down would be a big deal for him. A very big deal. Maybe the marketing people had upped and moved everyone to Klick Track or Wah-Wah as part of some new sales initiative, but somehow I didn’t think so. There was a massive, hollow, shuddering crack behind us, and everything in my head said the moment had come.
But all I could do was turn.
The doors were already flicking shut, and I swallowed.
“Jonny?” wavered Teb’s voice, after a pause.
“Jesus, Teb. I wondered what that was,” I breathed as he stumbled forward into us.
“‘When shall we three meet again?’”
“Teb?”
“‘In thunder lightning or in rain!’”
“That’s definitely enough Shakespeare,” I said, catching his drift, but he muttered on with it.
“‘When the hurly-burly’s done! When the battle’s lost and won.’”
I looked around, feeling the soft rub of my coat across my neck, and inexplicably made out some large red numbers dancing in the dark, like a large clock that was counting down at a ferocious rate, shoveling through hundredths of a second as though it was flicking through the pages of a book. Part of it read: sixty-four, fourteen, thirty-four, and I was trying to understand if that meant anything to me when the world imploded into a searing, scorching firestorm of light, suffocating the darkness, burning straight through my eyes, and searing across my head.
The sheer white-hot blaze of incandescence ahead of me made it feel as though God Himself had chosen that moment to finally descend to earth, perhaps to ask everyone what exactly they thought they were doing, precisely. And had anyone seen His glasses or something. All three of us cowered there while a voice cut through the white air.
“Kill it!” it cried, and I felt myself go numb with fear. The momentum from my run up the stairs suddenly washed away and my legs were violently heavy with inertia, as though I was stapled to the floor.
Then time stopped, but not literally.
I could somehow still see the red figures of the clock, and they froze, then hung in the air like a person who had opened his mouth but forgotten what it was he wanted to say. As I tried to think of anything in this vacuum of confusion, the fierce light blinked out with an audible, implosive “kaboof,” and a myriad of softer, warmer lights flickered on around and above us, gradually pulling the building out of the darkness and patching together the familiar atrium in soft blurred areas, which hardened into focus as my eyes readjusted. The four or five balconies that looked down from above were stacked with people I half recognized but couldn’t place with any certainty, and I suddenly realized they were clapping.
“Sixty-four hours, fourteen minutes, and fifty-six seconds,” the cold, clipped voice cried, somehow fin
ding its way over the cheers. My eyes scurried around to see who it was, and as it did, I wondered whether we should all just run now while there was still a sliver of a chance. But Teb could never make it, and we couldn’t just leave him.
Besides, we were not dead yet, and, although I wasn’t buying into this strange welcome, maybe there was a chance to find out what had been happening.
“Very commendable. I calculated you would take at least four days, but you’ve made it here in less than three.” The voice went on and my eyes settled on a figure directly ahead, hunched on the second-floor balcony next to a massive old-fashioned searchlight that was now switched off, but still faintly purring with a red glow.
My heartbeat stumbled as I wrenched the person into focus. It was Habakkuk. Habakkuk was standing there with a thin, weasel-like smile, his bald head glistening with perspiration, clapping with only a veiled gesture of effort, and I wondered why I had not known it would be him all along.
“It’s Habakkuk,” said Mat, quietly. “I knew that bastard was at the heart of this.”
“He certainly knew we were coming,” I said, above the lengthening noise of the weird ovation from the crowd.
“Habakkuk. Do you mind awfully if I ask you what the fuck is going on?” I said, deadening the applause so it stuttered to an embarrassed halt.
“Oh come on, Mr. X, surely you’ve worked it out! A genius like you?” he said into the echoing silence, reveling rather too openly, I thought, in my confusion. I didn’t like the way his words seemed to curl up at the ends either, almost as though they had been soaked in some sort of acid. Now I understood why Mat disliked him so much; maybe I had always made a bit of an effort to put up with him as a necessary pain in the ass because he was my boss, but as he stood there, leering down, all that goodwill just dried up.
“Did you do all this stuff to me?” I cried, but his face just broke into a strange, stifled wheezing laughter that seemed to be throttling the life from him. His whole expression reminded me of a gargoyle carved by some mischievous medieval stone-mason that looked like a cross between a hobgoblin and a strangely shaped potato. It suddenly occurred to me I had never actually seen Habakkuk laugh before, and he clearly needed a lot more practice and possibly some training. It drew my attention away from the fact the rest of the crowd seemed to find my last comment pleasantly amusing too.