He thought, this guy might have been knifed by some bastard he pissed off in prison during his fifteen years for killing Molly. Who right now wasn’t dead, and he hadn’t killed her. If he stayed out of prison, he could avoid meeting whoever it was, avoid pissing him off, and maybe avoid getting stuck like a pig in his capsule tonight. Future Spider came back here in a time machine, so what would stop this other guy, the murderer, from doing the same thing?
Or it could be something entirely else.
He made his way downstairs to the lobby, clutching the hand rail for support, wiping sweat out of his eyes with his free hand. Once there, he sat in the uncomfortable lobby chair and forced himself to have a look through the photos he’d taken.
Viewed this way, the scene was easier to take. There was none of the visceral, up-your-nose, sphincter-tightening horror. It was just pictures. And in some of the photos, he could see that there was sketchy, fingerpainting-in-blood writing along one wall of the capsule. This surprised him; he hadn’t noticed that when he was up there. He zoomed the image and read the message.
THE VORES ARE COMING
Who the hell are the Vores? he thought, reviewing the images. Was that “vores” as in, say, carnivores? Cannibals from the future? Had they killed Future Spider? He didn’t know.
A couple of guys asked if he was okay; he just nodded weakly. This, he knew, was going to get bad very fast. He’d have to call Iris. It was all related — it had to be related — to the dead woman in the time machine. Vaguely, as he tried to regain his composure, he remembered that he still needed to find an explanation for Mr. Vincent’s weird silence. Or maybe, he thought, thinking about what he’d just found, he didn’t want to get involved. Something bad was going on. He could see that. Anybody could see that. And it was something big. Murder was, probably, the least of it, he thought, but at that moment he could not have said just why he thought so. There was something ominous about that enigmatic message on the capsule wall, THE VORES ARE COMING. He got his watch to do a tube search on “Vores”, but he didn’t find anything helpful.
At great length, feeling a little better, he knew what he had to do, and called Iris. She answered almost immediately. “Spider? This is unexpected. I was just—”
“Iris, change of plan. Listen. I need you to bring your team out to The Lucky Happy Moon Motel, in Midland.”
She was quick. “Isn’t that your current domicile?”
“No flies on you,” he said, taking refuge in banter so he didn’t have to think about what he’d seen, and what he could still smell. “Just bring your guys out here. Without sounding all cliché or anything, I need to report a murder, of a sort.”
“You don’t sound good,” Iris said.
“Just get over here pronto.”
“Okay,” she said, recognizing his tone. “We’ll be right there.”
“One thing I should tell you.”
“Yeah?”
“The dead guy is me.”
“God,” Iris said, and Spider could tell that she was seeing where he was going, and what must have happened. “I bloody hate time travel.”
“Who doesn’t?”
He quietly informed Mrs. Ng what was going on. From her screen she could lock shut Spider’s capsule. “And it’s actually you?” she said, astonished. “Up there? All dead?”
“Future me, yeah.”
“Oh,” she said, disturbed for a moment. Then she said, smiling, “My grandson, Chris, he’s just a baby now, but he comes to visit me sometimes as an old man from the future. He tells me the most amazing things.”
“I bet he does,” Spider said, trying not to visualize the scene inside his capsule. After a moment’s effort to try to clear his head, he said, “Oh, and yeah. I’m gonna need another capsule.”
Later, once Iris had inspected the scene and left her team to deal with it, she came back downstairs to talk to Spider. They sat in a nook near Mrs. Ng’s desk. Mrs. Ng gave Spider a huge mug of impossibly sweet tea, and draped a colorful crocheted rug that smelled of dogs and incense around his shoulders. Iris recorded as he narrated the whole thing, doing his best to keep his voice steady, to speak only in facts, knowing that the number-one thought in Iris’s mind would be that Spider himself had killed his future self (and somehow got himself completely clean without drawing any attention, of course). It was too coincidental that the dead woman in the time machine incident should occur within a few days of this latest murder. He was the only common factor, he knew that, and fully expected to be taken in for questioning, and possibly even charged. Iris listened to his account, looking very serious and intense, making notes in her recorder, and asking for clarification here and there. When he finished, and verified his statement, Iris ran it back, listening again, nodding, biting her lip, making more notes. She said, “You know how bad this looks, don’t you?”
“You can’t seriously think I did it,” he said.
“You know,” she said, putting the recorder away, “to be perfectly frank with you, I actually don’t think it was you.”
“You don’t?” This surprised him. He wondered if she was toying with him. Would she do that? He remembered the Iris Street he’d known years ago, the one who was only too prepared to play along with departmental politics in order to get ahead, the one who wanted it all. Now, years later, she looked different. This Iris had a hard, lined, and weary look to her features, but she did seem genuine. A ruse? At this point, with so much on his mind, and no reason to imagine the Police Service would do the right thing by him, he doubted her, and imagined he’d be in a holding cell by the end of the night, and to hell with the lack of evidence.
Instead, she surprised him. “God no, Spider.”
“No? You don’t think all this looks rather suggestive? You don’t think there are guys still in the Service who’d be quite happy to see me do some hard time?”
She glared at him. “Yes, there very likely are some guys like that. Sure. There are probably quite a few who’d like to see the end of me, too, for that matter. That’s just the way it is. People are people. We’re petty. And what happened to you, that was rotten, that was. Bloody rotten. You did the right thing, at enormous cost to yourself. It was a bloody scandal!”
Spider was stunned. He stared at her. She still looked genuine. It was hard to take. Every cell in his body wanted to doubt her. Surely, she was just trying to get him off-balance, to make him drop his guard, so he’d say something incriminating. Surely, in other words, at some level, she was still “One of Them.” And yet, as she sat there, looking for all the world like a cop who wanted to help him, to do the right thing by him, he felt confused and angry and helpless. Some weird and nasty shit was going down around him, for no good reason that he understood, and he didn’t know what to do or whom to trust. In the end, though, worn out, and tired of doubting, he found himself saying, “Thanks, Iris. Means a lot to hear you say it.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Things have changed in the Service, or haven’t you heard?”
“To be honest, after I left, I didn’t hear much of anything for ages. Didn’t watch news, didn’t read the paper, certainly didn’t hang out online. It was all I could do just, you know, getting through each day. Probably had a bloody breakdown and didn’t even know it, I was so far gone.” Why he was telling her this he did not know, but it didn’t feel like a mistake. Maybe, it occurred to him, she wasn’t an enemy.
“God,” she said. “I didn’t know.”
He nodded and sipped at his tea. It was so sweet it was vile, but the warmth was good. Spider doubted he’d ever feel warm again.
Iris said, glancing through some crime scene images on her handheld, “So who do you reckon these ‘Vore’ bastards might be?”
“You saw that?”
“Hard to miss,” she said, allowing a small, wry smile.
“No idea,
” he said. “You’ll have to talk to Mrs. Ng, find out who’s been in and out all day.”
“Yup, got that in hand.”
“Sorry. Old habits.”
She nodded, not unkindly. “So, how are you doing now? Feeling any better?”
He still felt shivery and strange and upset. “Okay, I s’pose. Not exactly what I had in mind for this evening.”
She nodded. “Yes, well.”
Spider said, “So you really met, uh, ‘him’ last night, too?” It was difficult to figure out what to call Future Spider, without feeling ridiculous.
“I did, yes.” She avoided his eyes, saying this, he noticed. She went on, “Perhaps you could describe your own meeting with the deceased last night?”
Already, in his head, his memory of last night, driving around the burbs with Future Spider, was fraying. He felt as if he was trying to remember a dream he’d had a couple of nights before, as if he was leaving out important parts. Nothing made sense, but he did his best to sketch in what he could of the encounter — and how today none of it appeared to have happened at all, leading to his idea that his timeline had been shuffled around somehow, possibly to protect him. “On the one hand I was trying to deal with what happened to Molly, but then I’m talking to Molly on the phone, and she’s in Bangkok, for God’s sake.”
“There were no reports last night of a situation at her address.”
“The whole thing was probably faked, now that I think about it.”
“Spider,” Iris said after a thoughtful moment. “Did he mention, this future version of you…” She looked a little uncomfortable saying this. “Something called ‘Zeropoint?’”
For reasons he did not fully grasp at the time, on hearing that name Spider felt a sudden jolt of panic shoot through him. He wanted to get going, get away, leave, hide, keep his head down. Nothing good could be attached to that name, he believed, as if it was the sort of bad magic that reacts poorly on hearing its own name invoked. Surprised at this sudden flash of anxiety, he actually said to Iris, “I don’t know if we should be discussing that here.” Having said it, hearing himself, he felt ridiculous, but the fear was there. Something about the name was wrong; it was bad juju. He caught himself glancing about, trying to read closed faces, looking for hidden menace.
She pressed her point. “Do you know what it means?”
He was keen to change the subject, but the fact of his strange fear of that name was disturbing. On the one hand he wished they could talk about anything else, anything at all, even his future self’s death; but on the other, Spider had a tense, visceral feeling that he needed to know as much as he possibly could about Zeropoint, regardless of the consequences, even if it meant he’d wind up dead upstairs inside his capsule. It was as if, he was surprised to realize, his life — indeed, his entire existence — might depend on it. He remembered what Future Spider told him about Zeropoint, not that he had said much — but the idea that there were some kind of spooky bad guys off in the future, messing with timelines and histories, was gravely unsettling. It had certainly crossed his mind that these Zeropoint people might well have killed his future self, possibly for talking about them. “Not really, no. You?”
Iris looked as troubled as he felt, looked like she wanted to talk about it, get everything out in the open. “I got a call last night. I was getting ready to head home for the night. Long day. Frustration Central. Dead ends galore. So I’m putting on my coat and checking my stuff, and my phone goes off. I answer, and at first it sounds like you, and you need to see me right away.”
Spider was thinking about his own encounter with Future Spider, as he had stood on Molly’s front porch. “Go on,” he said.
“So anyway, it sounds like you, and for reasons I can’t disclose I explain that I can’t actually see you, not at the moment.”
“What?”
She rolled her eyes, looking dead tired. “Long story. Listen. I try to explain to you, er, Future You, that I can’t be talking to you. Word’s come down from head office. If I hear from you, I’m supposed to just cut you off, ignore anything and everything you might say.”
He thought about the empty days that followed the discovery of the dead woman in the time machine. “This is to do with the dead woman, or the other business?” The “other business” being his history with the Police Service.
“Look. Shut up. I’m trying to tell you what I know, and maybe getting myself in a whole bunch of shit for doing so, okay, so just bear with me.”
There were too many deep and messed-up emotions swirling around him right now. It was hard to sit still. “Sorry,” he said, “it’s just—”
“Yeah. I get it, Spider. I do.”
“You going to catch shit for talking to me now, about the business upstairs?”
She sighed, looking away. “Yeah, probably. I don’t know. I mean, you’re a material witness, at the very least, and certainly a person of interest. The fact that it’s your future self, for God’s sake — I pretty much have to talk to you. It’s just, there’s complicated stuff going on in the upper reaches of things, wheels within wheels, okay?” She sighed, shook her head and looked back at him, and flashed a weary smile. “God,” she said, “who’d be a bloody cop, huh?”
This made him smile. He was starting to feel that he might be able to trust her. She went on. “So you — shit, sorry, ‘Future You’ — ring up again, and this time I don’t even answer. All I wanna do is just go home, microwave some soup, and sit on my butt watching bad TV all night. One of those days. Too much politics, not enough chasing about catching bad guys, you know? The slightest thing you do, you have to complete an ‘Ethical Awareness Breakdown,’ and you have to work out the ‘Cost-Benefit Index Assessment,’ and you have to be always thinking about ‘PR Downsides,’ and let’s not forget the bloody ‘key-point indicators’—”
Spider blinked, surprised. “You have to deal with KPIs, too?”
“I think these days even God has to worry about his KPIs, frankly,” she said.
He nodded. “I wouldn’t be God for any amount of money, would you?”
“Too depressing,” she said. “Anyway, like I say, we’ve only got so many resources, and the city and metroplex is such a vast place, we have to make priorities and it just makes me crazy and I want to scream.”
“I had no idea it was like that these days.”
“You’ve got no bloody idea, Spider.”
“I can see that.”
“So I’m home, I’ve fed the bloody cat, I’ve had a shower — you know how you always felt like you wanted a shower when you got home? You remember that?”
He closed his eyes, and tried to control his breathing. “Oh yeah.”
“That part hasn’t changed. So I’m heating up some lamb korma, and my phone is just going nuts. Guess who? Yeah. I kill the link. He phones back. I kill the link. I take the phone off, screw it up, stomp it under my shoe — and guess what?”
“Turns up at your door?”
“Turns up at my door. Scares the shit out of the cat. I’m sitting there, eating my soup, I’m wearing my ratty old pajamas and my Cthulhu slippers—”
Despite everything, Spider had to laugh at this image of Iris.
“Oh yeah, don’t you mock Great Cthulhu. He’ll come and eat your brain, he will.” She smiled, and it looked like a genuine sharing-a-laugh-with-a-mate smile, not like a politeness.
He laughed some more. “I never saw you as the monster-slipper type, Iris.”
She nodded, smiled, and said, “Anyway, so there’s you at the door, banging away, yelling that you have to see me, and how it’s all important, and lives are at stake, and all this.”
“Future Spider was busy last night,” he said, absently.
“So I go to the door, and I’m yelling through it, telling him to fuck off or I’ll call my mates to
take him away. He won’t budge. He says he needs to talk to me tonight. He says it’s about you, only he calls you his ‘past self.’ I say ‘what?’ and he gets me to switch on the security cam, and sure enough, it is you, but it’s really not you. This is an old and seedy version of you — sorry…”
“He told me he’d done fifteen years for the murder of Molly. Which he said he didn’t actually do.”
“That’s what he told me, too — but I was also thinking maybe it was just regular you, and you were pulling some ridiculous stunt.”
“Why would I do something like that?”
“I don’t know. It was a weird situation.”
“So,” he said, “what’d you do?”
“I let him in.”
“Was that wise?”
“See previous comment: it was a weird situation. It was you, sort of. I trust you.”
This was also news to Spider, but he wasn’t sure if he believed it. “Thanks,” he said, “anyway…?”
“So we talked. A lot. He was definitely you: he remembered all kinds of stuff from, well, before, you know.”
Spider felt himself starting to blush a little, thinking about what things his future self might remember about Iris from “before.” “And at some point he told you about Zeropoint.”
She nodded. “He said they’re some kind of security service-type outfit, only they exist, he said, in the remote future, and there’s this war on for control of all of history. I’m all, ‘What the fuck?’”
“Go on,” Spider said, amazed. This was more than he had got from his own run-in with Future Spider.
“There was a lot of stuff he said, too much — and would you believe it never occurred to me to record any of it?”
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