by Guy Adams
There was a knocking at his door. This seemed deeply unreasonable to Tom, in the way that such things always are to those that have only just awoken. He lay there for a moment hoping it would have the common decency not to happen again. It didn't. Three chirpy knocks followed by Miles' voice: "You there Tom? We were going to grab some breakfast."
Dear Christ… did the man have no mercy?
"Be down in a few minutes," Tom replied, hoping the pillow didn't smother the words too much. "Just finish dying first."
"Righto," Miles replied, in that insufferably cheerful tone reserved by those without hangovers for talking to those with them.
Tom listened to their footsteps move away, then the distant ping of the elevator as it arrived to ferry them to the restaurant. He breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn't quite ready for company yet. He rolled slowly out of his bed and stared at his face in the mirror. It was not the most reassuring sight to wake up to. Tom scowled but that only made his reflection look worse so he got up and moved out of the mirror's range. He felt an empty miniature bottle pop beneath his heel as he plodded towards the bathroom. And that's why the professional drunk goes to bed with his shoes on, he thought. Unzipping his fly he took the long, long piss of the morning after. The sort of marathon evacuation that usually sees you resting your head against the wall and taking a nap halfway through. Once done he shuffled back out, catching another glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror. He looked like the ghost of a man who had been struck by lightning. He beat at his rebellious hair, though knew it was pointless. Best plan was just to wedge it under his cap and move on. After the act of finding and then fixing his hat on his head forced him to take a sit down in order to get his breath back he turned his thoughts to breakfast. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all… apparently the human body responded well to food. Turned it into energy or something… what the hell, Tom would try anything once.
12.
The restaurant was beige and gold, entering it was like walking into an old-fashioned handbag. The overload to his senses was so high that Miles felt full even before he'd visited the breakfast buffet. In the corner a TV blared that morning's news in such an over-enthusiastic manner you'd think war had been declared. The current item was a piece of filler, a kooky old lady from Massachusetts had glimpsed the face of Jesus in her morning pancakes. The reporter was enthusing over this as if it may very well be the second coming, the camera offering a maple-syrup drizzled messiah from all angles.
"This place is making my head ache," Carruthers complained.
"No, the amount of vodka you drank last night is doing that… you need to eat and drink as much as you can, it's the only thing that will fix you."
"Like Alice switching from one magical potion to the next… I am quite aware how to restore my health thank you."
"Really?" Miles smiled. "Given how you went at it last night I got the impression you'd never drunk before in your life."
"I'm just not used to your noxious, future brews."
"Then get used to our dazzling future bacon and hash browns, they can cure anything."
"I shall endeavour to do so."
They piled their plates high and returned to their table.
"Get you some coffee?" asked a waitress who clearly needed some herself, she certainly seemed in danger of falling asleep.
"I suppose tea's out of the question?" Carruthers asked.
She looked at him as if he'd just asked for a glass of duck urine. "I'm sure we can rustle some up for you," she replied, though her lack of conviction was pronounced.
"Coffee's fine," said Miles, "lots of it. Some orange juice too if you have it."
"You're in the Orange State, sir, I'm sure we can find some somewhere." She smiled, just. Miles felt like applauding her effort, it clearly hadn't been easy. He settled for a polite nod and went back to attacking his eggs.
"She was charming," Carruthers said after she'd gone. "Nice to see you can still manage customer service in your enlightened age."
"We excel at it, now eat your bacon."
They ate in silence, grazing on their breakfast and washing it down with all the coffee they could consume. Tom appeared, following the routine they had laid down, piling his plate with scrambled eggs and bacon rashers.
Once they were done, stuffed full and well on their way towards a more productive state of mind, Carruthers brought out his notebook. Tom made a crack at that – he wasn't one for organisation – but it was lighthearted, today was going to be a good day, he'd decided.
"So," said Carruthers "we know that Chester will be discovered tomorrow, walking up Highway 192 – very lyrical name by the way. We can't precisely mark the place where he was dumped…"
"Can't mark it all in fact," Tom said. He shrugged as the other two looked at him. "What? I'm just being honest here. The guy's walking along the hard shoulder for how long? I mean he could have been dumped miles away."
"True," Carruthers admitted, "but it's all we have to go on."
"That's the problem with this whole fool's errand," Tom said.
In the corner the TV flickered. It had left Christ the Breakfast Redeemer alone and jumped to the weather – which, a surprise to nobody, was due to be hot and sunny round their way. The oiled and tanned fellow – who appeared no less animalistic than a baby orangutan rammed in a suit – was guffawing about all the great sunshine that was headed their way when the screen pixellated and fuzzed, the negative ghost of a man's face appearing through the snow. Nobody noticed.
"There's this place that Loomis was building," said Miles, "hell of a coincidence that don't you think? Right where we're thinking of looking and he just comes out with it?"
The screen returned to the apelike weatherman who was now hurling cartoon suns in the air. Perhaps he too had seen the face of Christ in his breakfast.
"But coincidence is all it is," insisted Tom. "We may as well check our horoscopes and plan the day that way."
The static swamped the screen again, that vague outline of a face, struggling to be born.
"I'm not sure I believe in coincidence either," Carruthers admitted, "but we do know that there are forces at work here that…"
"Have no fucking interest in real estate, you can bet your ass on that!" Tom shouted. The waitress gave him a dirty look but he ignored her.
The sound on the TV cut out and that did draw attention, they had all got used to its incessant chirpiness in the background and its absence was as distracting as a shout across the room.
"TV's on the fritz," Tom muttered. "Some hotel this is."
The face on the screen solidified, just for a second, it was the Grumpy Controller, his mood not in the least improved by the effort he was having to expend in his attempts to communicate. "Home Town!" he shouted and with an awesome popping noise the glass screen exploded outwards, making the waitress scream and showering them all in thick glass fragments.
As the moment passed, all of them staring at the smouldering box in the corner, Miles drained his coffee cup and got to his feet.
"Max Headroom says we follow Loomis and that's good enough for me."
13.
Hughie listened to the night orchestra. In Florida the nights were when the animals woke up and gave a shit. Maybe they just liked to avoid the tourists. The frogs were calling back and forth, the cicadas running their crappy moped engine of a song, the hoot and caw of the night birds, rolling their beady little eyes over the black undergrowth for something to rip and tear. Hughie listened to it all. It sure beat the noises coming from inside his own house. Those noises had started out as conversation, somewhere along the line they had grown wet as the stranger gave up talking nicely and started playing hard. Hughie didn't want to listen to those noises. Not because he feared for Loomis – God help him he had been far beyond the point of safe return the minute he had lowered that car window. Not because he felt guilt at what was happening, as much as it pained him to admit it, Hughie just didn't have space in his pounding heart for sympat
hy right now. Hughie didn't want to hear those noises because he couldn't shake the conviction that one day soon he'd be making some just like it. That was the cold, selfish truth of it and while Hughie wasn't proud, he had known himself far too long to deny the truth. So he listened to the animals and wished he could be out there with them.
After a couple of hours the stranger stepped out onto the veranda next to him. He held a pair of beers in his glistening hands and he handed one to Hughie. Hughie took it, dared do nothing else. He tried not to think about how sticky it felt where the stranger had held it. He was glad he never had fixed that outside light, darkness could be a blessing.
"Thought you might want another," the stranger explained, tipping his own beer to his lips and taking a long draught.
Hughie drank too, startled by how ice-cold the beer was.
"I fixed the refrigerator," the stranger explained. "Warm beer's no good to anyone."
A rogue thought popped into Hughie's head and he spoke it, better that than talk about Loomis. "First time I've seen you drink anything."
"I don't make a habit of it," the stranger admitted. "Like food, I consume it for the hell of it, for the dirty thrill."
Hughie couldn't quite view food and drink in those terms and his confusion was pronounced enough for the stranger to pick up on it.
"I'm not human, Hughie, you've always known that."
Yes, Hughie supposed he always had. "Yeah," he admitted, washing the solitary word back down with another mouthful of beer.
"You can ask me, Hughie," the stranger said, and even in the dark Hughie knew he was grinning from ear to ear. "Go on, ask me."
"What are you?"
"You ever play with ants when you were a kid Hughie?" the stranger replied, rather than answer the question. "Maybe hold a glass bottle up in the sun and watch them burn in the heat of the rays?"
"No," and it was true, Hughie had never taken pleasure in destroying something else. When he was a kid he'd got guilty just swatting flies. He just didn't have the strength of self to go beating up on something else, as much as he might have been tempted from time to time.
The stranger chuckled. "Good for you, your God probably loves you for it."
"Don't believe in God," Hughie replied.
"You do now!" the stranger laughed, spitting a thin jet of beer onto the wood between his feet. "OK…" he said once he'd got his laughter under control, "so you never tortured ants, good for you… spoils my analogy but we can run with it anyway. What does the ant think? When the heat starts eating into his shiny little carapace, turning his miniature guts into stew?"
"I don't know…" Hughie shrugged, "it don't think nothing… it just burns."
"It can't understand, the scale is too big. It can't crook its head over its singed shoulder and think 'that damned kid burned me' it has no concept of the kid or the bottle, can barely even discern them with its tiny little eyes… they are utterly beyond it."
"Yeah."
The stranger nodded and drained his beer. "I'm the kid with the bottle, Hughie." He threw his own empty bottle into the undergrowth and turned to go back inside. "Now come and help me clean up this shit."
Hughie did as he was told. However many principles a man may have, he does what he needs to in order to keep on breathing.
They had gathered the meat and bones of what had once been Ted Loomis in a bed sheet – Hughie's only bed sheet now he came to think about it – and lifted them out to the swamp. Hughie, thinking about how the stranger had carried Loomis into the house in the first place, not even breaking a sweat, couldn't help but ask as the corpse splashed and began to sink in the gloomy water: "Why d'you get me to do this? You could have managed on your own."
The stranger patted him on his back, leaving a red hand print that would glare at Hughie a couple of hours later when he caught sight of it in the bathroom mirror. "Of course I could have managed," he said, "but I wanted you to do it."
"Holding up your bottle in the light of the sun."
The stranger laughed at that. "You've got it Hughie, you've got it."
They walked back towards the house. Now Hughie had started asking the questions he figured he might as well go for broke and ask the one that hung in his mind most often. "You going to kill me?"
The stranger shrugged. "Maybe, I doubt it though… can't see the fun in it."
"Why do you keep me around then?"
"Because sometimes things only mean something when you have an audience," the stranger admitted. "That and the fact that you're useful as a resource. You taught me all you know!"
There was one question left and Hughie couldn't leave it hanging there: "What are you going to do?"
"What, now? Watch TV for a bit probably… I like TV."
"No, you know what I mean, what are you going to do in the end? What's your plan?"
The stranger took a deep breath, enjoying the feel of it in the silly meat and gristle of his chest. "To be honest Hughie I just don't know, I guess the only honest answer is: whatever I like."
14.
The stranger was being as truthful as ever. When he had left his prison he had always imagined he would just go back to his old lifestyle, wallow in the flesh of these creatures and play for a while – that kid with the bottle that he had alluded to – but the more he thought about it the more he guessed that wouldn't be the case. It wasn't boredom, though that would come soon enough, it always had. It was just an itch… a leaning towards something bigger. There was an element of fear there, an emotion that was still incredibly new to him, a feeling only just learned, knocked into him when his own kind had come back to this reality and put him in his place. Would they return? Would they know that he had slipped out of their cage and was on the loose? Would they even care? He didn't know. But he feared the answers just the same. He had an idea that the next time they came calling they may not settle for imprisonment. They didn't have his patience, his love of games. No, he thought they'd likely just wipe him out of existence entirely, a tiresome little aberration that was too much trouble for his own good.
So what to do?
Home Town intrigued him. Intrigued him because it was a mystery and there had been precious few of those in his existence. It was a place layered in coincidence. It was where he was supposed to abandon Chester – and he would, in his own good time, he had an idea that he might have a game or two to offer Chester yet. It was also where the kid would grow up and set his hands on the box again. A coincidence. The stranger didn't believe in coincidences. He believed in patterns. Was this a pattern? Barely… with only two events linked to it… but maybe… He would go take a look, get a feel for the place himself. Then he would see how he felt. Then he would begin to make plans.
15.
Hughie had mopped the floor of his kitchen where the stranger had carried out his interrogation. No, not an interrogation, the stranger didn't need to get his hands dirty for that, could pull all he needed to know straight out of a man's head. This had been a game, that was all. He had called himself a kid with a bottle, burning the ants beneath him for fun. Hughie thought he was the kid that took his toys apart to see how they worked too, just for the hell of seeing something stripped bare.
It had been a thankless job, the torn and curling linoleum clinging to every blood splatter however hard Hughie beat at it with the old mop. He had started off with hot water and then finished the job with cold, the hot water tank unable to keep up with his demands. By the time he'd finished it wasn't perfect but it was better. Sometimes better just had to be enough.
Hughie went to bed on his bare mattress. He wasn't in the least bit tired but he wanted to get away from the stranger sat in his easy chair watching CSI reruns. As he lay there, he thought back to that long night lying out at the head of the dirt track. Covered in those rattling Diamondbacks waiting for dawn. Part of him was beginning to realise his situation was no different now. The Diamondback was sat downstairs, laughing at the CSI team as they plodded their way towards truth via sp
latter reports and dust fibre analysis. Hughie wondered when it was going to turn around and bite.
The following morning, Hughie thought for a moment that the time had come. The snake in his house was grinning and his teeth glistened with the potential to chew and maim.
"We're going for a drive," the stranger said. "Get the car started."
16.
They needed a car, and Tom had got directions from the reception desk to a Hertz place nearby. As he was paying for it with Loomis' stolen card he suddenly realised that had been a mistake. Surely the man would have reported the card lost by now? The transaction sailed through and Tom took the card back in surprise.