by Alan Osi
“Yeah,” she said, with the same air of distraction. The chick was gone.
132. JUNE
Life-and-death stuff was going on around me, somewhere outside of this bubble. I should have been worried. But, worry couldn’t touch me. I was having the most intense feeling of déja vu. It was gorgeous, beautiful, true, and bittersweet.
I was here, in this moment, and I was also a little girl, in my backyard on the swings my father put up for me, watching this moment happen. It wasn’t just the feeling of having seen this before at some earlier date. But, as if I were both here and in my past all at once, and in each place, looking at the other version of myself through time. I was both the adult woman and the little girl I’d once been, and conscious of being both. It was beyond odd. And that was why I couldn’t be afraid for Percival or even myself; because I was eight and dreaming the whole scenario in my head. Dreaming of being an adult, of the unimaginable adventures I would have, the strange and terrible feelings.
I had no reason to believe that my déja vu had something to do with moondust, which at that point I’d still not yet ever taken. But, somehow I did believe that.
“You alright there, girl?” I heard Hailey ask me, and superimposed on the same moment, the child me heard the cawing of a crow, winging its way across the sky.
“Yeah,” I said to Hailey. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Good, Percival needs our help,” she said.
When I heard her say that, I thought again of the danger, for a second I was totally in her time. I could focus: The doubling was gone. It wasn’t eight o’clock, staring at the empty sky where the crow had been, aimlessly swinging back and forth, and killing time.
Hailey started telling me about her plan to help him, and I was relieved that I could listen. I was scared for us, yet determined to help. But, by the time she was halfway through her spiel, I was stuck between two times again, and everything she was saying faded into abstraction.
133. HAILEY
This June chick wasn’t going to be any help to me at all. She’d gone space cadet or something: What a damned flake. What did Perce see in her?
“What drugs are you on, and where can I get some?” I said. She didn’t answer at all.
“Hey!” I yelled, and snapped my fingers in front of her face. She flinched and looked at me, finally.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s like I’m two places at once.”
“Acid? Robo?”
“What?” she said distractedly, gone again. A total lost cause.
I put my hands behind my head and stared up at the gray sky. Things were breaking against me: Percival going commando; June going blank.
Which lead me to Mark—wherever he was, he seemed the only person in this crew I could count on. Last I saw him, he’d been inside, sipping on some version of a martini or another, watching the crowd and the event with a typical Mark-like detachment. But, that was a while ago. I’d been so worried about Percival, I hadn’t even texted him when I realized the thugs were here.
I did it now, sent him a message saying I needed his help ASAP.
Waiting for his response, I saw Max the reporter: he stumbled in the middle of the street, moving away from me, toward the cars parked on the other side. Every bit as drunk as Percival thought he’d be. Therefore, completely useless. I’d hoped Perce had exaggerated.
Max stumbled up to one of the cars on the side of the street, went around to the other side of it, and stood there for a second, making some movements with his hands that the car obscured.
Oh, my God, was he going to pee on that car?
He did pee on it. And for some sick reason, I sat there watching him, at least until something spooked him. In fact, he even stopped peeing in what looked like midstream, which I found funny enough to smile—a miracle under the circumstances. That is, until I realized what had spooked him. People in the car.
Wait, why were people in the car?
This street was deserted except for us, our event. And our party wasn’t the kind of thing kids drove to, let alone sat outside of in a sedan. So my hackles rose, and then, when Smith actually got in the car, and stayed in there for some time, he confirmed my suspicions.
I felt like hyperventilating, I had to do that breathing thing I learned on a moondust ride to calm down again, and then I lit a cigarette for my nerves, trying to be nonchalant when I did so. I pretended to stroll up and down the street casually, maybe around the block. I didn’t get thirty feet before I spied another car with people in it. I could see them because one of them smoked a cigarette. The faint red ember moving lazily inside the cabin of another unmemorable sedan was a dead giveaway.
Smith, that preppy chauvinist asshole pig-fucker, had gone to the cops and now the cops were here. We were being raided.
There was no more time for planning or need for stealth. I turned around, walked back toward the party, texting as I went.
134. LEONARD
Call came through over the radio. It was a beat cop, Kiernan, I think.
“We’ve been made,” he said. “Hipster chick walked right up to my car, looked me dead in the eye, over.”
“That’s what happens when you roll down the window and smoke during a covert op, asshole,” responded Shelly.
“How’d you know I was smoking?”
Shelly spat, “Kiernan, shut up and wait for us to save this from you. Over. “She slammed the receiver down on the dashboard. Kid was aces in my book.
“So, what now?” she said, turning to me.
“We got all the exits covered.”
“But, we’re stretched way too thin, and they’re going to start flushing the drugs down the toilets as fast as they can.”
“Won’t be fast enough,” I said. “Too many people in there. Our girl who made Kiernan is either connected—in which case she’s going to tell the players to dump their holdings—or she’s a hanger on and she’s going for her coat. Either way, we’ll find enough to get the ball rolling, don’t you worry.”
“What, you want to go now?”
“Four minutes. Get the word out. “
“Isn’t that rushing it? We were pushing our luck as it was.”
I looked at her hard. “We work with what we have.”
The cards weren’t great. But, we were playing them. Period.
135. PERCIVAL
People all around me unraveled. Some were heading to the exit, practically running. The ones who stayed didn’t seem much more together. There was a girl hugging one of the load-bearing columns in the room as though the ground moved. There was a quake going on, kind of; the earth didn’t shake, but something else did. Call it ether.
This felt like taking moondust without taking moondust. But, it was worse, also. We were leaving at random. As if, after blinking, you found yourself in a different scenario, a different time and place, sometimes with a different soul. Other times you remained you.
The problem was getting worse, too; I could feel it. Something bad was coming, and we were powerless. Leaving was the only option, and I couldn’t not go, at least after I took care of the business at hand.
And so I choked down two types of fear and scanned the crowd, focusing on faces, keeping my back to the wall. No one matched Hailey’s description; they were probably still upstairs, where she’d seen them. But I wasn’t about to go up. It made more sense to stay here and wait, until I saw one of them, even if I waited all night.
The music stopped: Wally had let the song he was playing end without starting another. He stared into space a blank expression. And since the bass had stopped, normal sounds returned to the world. The babble of the crowd. Kids yelling to each other, seeking reassurance.
But hearing fear in other human voices spurred the general panic. Over at the bar, one of the guests screamed at the girl behind the counter, named Henri. “What did you give us?” Henri couldn’t answer. She didn’t know.
And then I became an albatross. Winging a slow beat, hearing only wind, alone in twin exp
anses of blue. Sky and sea.
136. HAILEY
I went inside just as people were starting to leave in a hurry. It scared me bad at first, because I couldn’t tell what they ran from—maybe the cops already raided? But, after I took a breath and checked the scene, I ruled that out. People seemed freaked out, but in a totally different way than if police busted us. They seemed, like, zombies or something. Like they all had a really bad trip.
But I couldn’t worry about that. I needed to find Mark, wherever he was. Last I saw him, he was sipping a martini and watching the crowd. But, that was a long time ago.
The crowd had changed, from a familiar party kind of chaos to simple plain old chaos. What was going on here? Maybe, in order to find Mark, I had to figure that out. So I forced myself to take a second and get my bearings.
The music stopped. Wally let the song end without playing another. Instead he stared into space, looking stupider than usual. His face looked totally vacant, the same look I’d seen on June’s face, and actually on maybe a quarter of the people around me. The other 75 percent either looked confused, horrified, or they headed for the exit. There was a serious log-jam at the door, so the crowd wasn’t leaving as much as milling. If things got panicky, we were going to have a serious problem, maybe a stampede.
What was happening? And where was Mark?
I got scared, seriously afraid. I wanted to find my friend, and I wanted it so bad something happened. I had that soul-disconnecting-from-body feeling, which accompanied a moondust ride, and then I saw the world through Mark’s eyes.
137. MARK
Tonight was like a bad jazz song, it started out beautifully. But descended into something chaotic, terrifying, and ugly.
I was in the storage room upstairs, alone, with my head in my hands. Nightmares shuddered through me. They wouldn’t stop. I had maybe one minute between each, give or take, and then the next would come. Really bad experiences, moments in people’s lives filled with unimaginable suffering.
I was in here hiding, I could only deal with this horror alone. And I had just one or two minutes between experiences to figure out what was happening to me. Sometimes thirty seconds.
Was this some sort of moondust bad trip? Like how acid stays in your spine forever, and may suddenly trigger?
I had no time to contemplate the answer: After I asked the question, I went away again, into in a thief’s body, so many centuries ago, as he was tortured, hanged on a cross made out of wood, rope around my ankles and wrists, my whole body’s weight pushing down on me, stealing my breath, causing agony with each heartbeat. The deepest hell.
I couldn’t tell you how long that lasted. Hanged like that, time had no meaning. But, eventually, I was back in the present, again, I was me, again. Holding my wrists and breathing hard. I couldn’t take this anymore.
What was happening?
138. HAILEY
Then I came back to myself. Had I actually been in Mark? Was he really up there? How was it possible that I—that both of us—was going on moondust rides without having taken moondust? I felt like puking. But, I needed to get myself together, figure out what to do.
Going to Mark for help was out. I didn’t know if I had any time left, anyway. And suddenly, the fact that everyone around me had freaked out made total sense. Something was happening that we’d never figured. Something bad.
Fear caused my stomach to push into my throat. But, I swallowed, shoving it down again, and took a couple of deep breaths. Time to take stock of my situation, again.
Cops waited outside, planning to raid us. Three kids inside planned to hurt or kill Percival. I had the trump card, moondust balloons ready to burst at the push of a button.
I needed to find Percival. How had I gotten sidetracked? Even if I didn’t intervene directly I needed eyes on the situation. I could always drop the balloons if I need to—preferably after I warned him to close his eye.
139. LEONARD
Much as I hated to admit it, it looked like I’d been wrong. I figured no way hipster kids could mobilize a response to learning a raid was coming. But, they started leaving the place in droves, nearly a stampede. Looked scared too, every one of them.
There was something to that. But, I didn’t have time to figure out what. We needed to go, now. They must have planned for the contingency of a raid for the floodgates to open like this, and the longer we waited the less chance anything would be left worth finding. I’d been stupid to give everyone time to get ready. We should have gone in right then.
But I couldn’t change the past. All I could control was my next move, so I got on the radio.
“Attention, Greene here. We go on now. Thirty seconds, hot. Over.”
“What the hell, sir?” said Shelly when I clicked off.
“You forgetting I’m your superior officer?” I said while securing my gun, handcuffs, mace, Taser, and shoelaces. Shelly was not doing the same.
“That’s why I said ‘Sir.’ But, listen, you can’t—”
“I can. I’m going in now, if I have to go in alone.”
Shelly wasn’t the only one with reservations. Someone, who didn’t identify himself, came through on the radio, saying, “With respect, detective, we go in half-cocked like you’re suggesting, that’s chaos. People get hurt, we all get suspended or canned. Not what I signed on for. Over.”
Truth was, a big part of me understood; whoever said that had a point, a damn good one. A raid had to be clockwork, because once you went in, anything could happen. Sloppiness killed people. But, this wasn’t a normal situation.
I said, “I hear you. Now hear me. This isn’t another crack den, this is ground zero of a whole new problem. We can bust a hundred bangers an hour—won’t matter, more just crawl out the gutters. But, we can make an actual difference here. If that’s not worth risking your career over, I get it. But, it’s worth risking mine. Backup would be nice. Over. “
I got out of the car, and started walking, slowly, toward the door.
140. SHELLY
Sometime in the last two minutes, right before my eyes, Lenny Greene turned into Captain Fucking Ahab. He gave his little speech into his handheld, then got out of the car, because he chose to go it alone; leaving me sitting there with my mouth hanging, shocked.
What the fuck was he doing? You never did this sort of thing, ever. He really put the rest of us on the spot. Did we follow our brother into the fray, into a situation doomed to end badly because he went rogue, or did we leave him to his fate?
But I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to him; rule number one, we always backed our own. Always. Cursing a blue streak, I opened my door and followed him. My adrenaline kicked like a mule. I looked around, to see who had our backs. I counted three other cops. The rest burned rubber away, in a rush to make it look like they were never here.
As I walked, I steeled myself. The moon shone big and bright, and the city lay quiet, except for the noises coming from the building in front of me, and I breathed raggedly, the cool, thick, black night air. There would be blood.
141. YVONETTE
In the coke,
Doing bathroom.
Doing so much so I didn’t have to be
Didn’t have to see
Didn’t care what happened next, and so.
One line too big and I sweated every ocean in the world
And I was shaking and I couldn’t really see and
I fell back against the stall wall and
Pushed my palm
Into my nose
A supernova in my chest sucking bone meat and skin in,
Lungs emptied,
Couldn’t breathe, O.D.,
Then a white, white, white light.
I was flying into
The Jesus Sun.
142. PERCIVAL
Finally, I spotted the guys chasing me, coming down the stairs. I was staking out the staircase from the perfect spot, kind of behind it, at an angle where I could see up about halfway while staying hidden.
They definitely wouldn’t notice me. Too much was going on.
People fought each other to get out fast, falling over as they tried to leave—a crowd turning into a stampede. Anyone not pushing their way toward the only exit had collapsed on the floor or stood catatonically still, out on moondust. Some people dragged unconscious lovers or friends. Others left theirs behind.
What had we done to these people? To ourselves?
I cycled in and out of moondust trips, too, barely holding on. Reality felt like a bubble bursting and reforming, over and over; it drove everyone to panic. I would have run for the exits, too. But, I needed to finish this, no matter what.
Therefore, despite the danger, the three dudes in hoodies were a welcome sight.
They argued as they came down the stairs, I couldn’t hear their words. But, they gestured hard and angry. One more than the others, he had to be the leader. I would hit him first. He walked in front, leading them down the stairs. I couldn’t see faces, the loose hoodies obscured them.
My fingers tightened around the bat. I made myself ready.
143. WILLIAM
We were finally leaving. The place was going crazy, I had to get out. We should’ve already been gone. But, Clyde and I hadn’t been able to convince Rob that the instructions written on the walls were legit, that we got what we’d come for as soon as we hit the second floor.
Why wouldn’t they be real? Why throw this party just to fake everyone out? Rob said it didn’t make sense to give away a designer drug recipe. But, it made less sense to pretend. And the moondust upstairs, free and in bulk, was definitely the real deal. Why give away thousands in free product, but lie about the production method?