I shake her hand. “They call this place Neuro for a reason, right?”
The elevator ascends as Stephanie nods.
“Are you aware of what Neuro really does?” I ask.
“You mean, like why you’re able to fall through floors?”
I wait for an answer.
“No idea. We’re all kept pretty separate. My expertise is memory, but I don’t think that’s high on our management’s priority list. I’m pretty far out of the inner circle.”
“You knew who I was,” I point out.
“My predecessor is the one who…” She taps my head. “I’ve studied your file. What they did to you. Your photo was in it.”
“When did you look at the file?” I ask.
“They gave it to me a week ago.”
“Why?”
She pauses, unsure about whether she either can or should reply. “They wanted to know if it could be undone.”
The idea of having my memory returned has never occurred to me. Sure, I’ve daydreamed about it. Wondered who I was. But, realistically, I thought memories, once lost, couldn’t be regained. The trouble is, I’m not sure I want to remember. Seems like all I knew was pain, anger, and death. “Can it?”
“I don’t know. My access was pulled two days ago. I was given a new assignment…” She lowers her voice like someone is listening, which could be the case. “But I think the answer they were hoping for is no.”
Huh, I think, and then the elevator stops.
“So there is no way to access that file now?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Not for me, but all my results were inconclusive. You wouldn’t learn much about yourself that you don’t already know.”
“You might be surprised,” I say.
“Right.” A sheepish smile emerges. “No memory.”
The doors slide open. I take a step toward the waiting hallway and stop. “You seem like a good person. Not afraid to look where you want. Didn’t lose your mind when I fell through the ceiling.”
“And the floor.”
“I respect that. We friends?”
“You available?” she asks.
“Married,” I say. “Not that I can remember it.”
“Then yes,” she says. “We’re friends.”
I lean closer to her. “Then as your friend: get the hell out of here. I don’t think it’s going to be a safe place to be for much longer.”
“O—okay…”
“Now.”
She takes off her white lab coat and hands it to me.
“I don’t think it will fit,” I say.
“Tie it around your waist.”
I do as instructed, making myself a little more appropriate, and step backward out of the elevator. She gives a wave, and the doors close.
Alone in the hallway, I turn toward the sound of voices. A door before the Documentum room is open. I pad my way over, bare feet silent on the floor. It’s a security center. Everyone from the lab, minus Cobb, is there, huddled together, backs to me. Monitors display images of the inside and outside of the building. But a large screen at the center of the display shows an angry mob. They’re watching the news?
“Hey,” I say.
The group turns around as though one entity with a unified mind.
“Where were you?” Winters asks. She sounds genuinely concerned.
“Sixth floor. Then fifth.” I turn to Lyons. “You were right about the laws of physics. They definitely work the same on the other side.”
“You fell two floors down?” Allenby asks.
“One at a time,” I say. “But yes.”
“Awesome.” Dearborn grins. “Our very own demigod.”
“Hardly,” I say, and point at the monitors cycling through images of the building’s interior. Stephanie appears on screen, talking to some people, a smile on her face. Probably joking about me. “You should have seen me on the screens.”
“We were distracted.” Katzman sounds tense. A little angry, which is nothing new, but you’d think he’d also be impressed. I did just fall through a solid floor. He motions to the angry mob on the big screen. Like the march in Manchester, I see protest signs, masks, and weapons. The people in whatever city this is plan to get violent.
“Where is this?” I ask, thinking it must be somewhere in New Hampshire. Concord or Nashua, maybe.
Lyons, red-faced, eyes like an angry bull’s, rounds on me. “This is right outside our doors! In the parking lot!” He leans toward me. “What didn’t you tell me?”
29.
I’m about to explain that I came across pugs in the colony to the south and that the Dread understand English. Probably all human languages if they’ve been around for as long as Lyons thinks. But when a security guard enters, pale with fear, freckled face dripping sweat, I don’t need to.
“They’re here!” the man shouts. He’s hysterical. A real mess. Right up until the moment I punch him in the face. He drops to the floor, out cold.
“Whoa!” Dearborn says, raising his hands and stepping away, like he might be next.
“Hey!” Katzman yells, shoving me out of the way as he assesses the damage.
“Josef,” Allenby says. “You promised!”
She’s right. I did promise her I wouldn’t knock anyone out. But the guard isn’t just a guard.
“You have a security problem,” I say to Lyons.
“No kidding,” Katzman says, glaring up at me. He turns to Lyons. “He’s out of control.”
“Stop,” Winters says, stepping between Katzman and me, but the emphasis is directed toward me. She knows that if an altercation is unavoidable, I’ll act first, and that I’ll win. She also knows that’s not going to help anyone. “Please, everyone stop and think. We all know he’s impulsive, to say the least, but he never does something without good reason … or at least what he thinks is a good reason.” Looking back and forth between Lyons and Katzman. “You’ve read my profile of him. You both know this. So why not have a little talk before resorting to violence, which we all know is going to end poorly for anyone who isn’t a fearless world-class assassin, who, may I remind you, can move through solid objects.”
In the silence that follows, I whisper to Winters. “Thanks for calling me Crazy.”
“It’s what you prefer right now.”
“So you wrote a profile on me?”
“Part of my job is to psych eval the people that—”
“Do you normally sleep with—”
She puts her hand on my chest. Speaks quietly. “I know you have no fear, and that leads you to say whatever is on your mind, but that’s not an excuse to be inconsiderate of others. What we had … We both needed it.”
“Sorry,” I say. She’s right. And though I have no memory of what there was between us, the tension that exists when we’re together says that some part of me remembers. The feel of her hand on my chest is …
Distracting.
I lift her hand away. “Later.”
Lyons and Katzman still haven’t made up their minds, so I decide to give them a visual aid. I kneel down next to the fallen guard.
Katzman is giving me a “don’t you dare touch him” stare, but he should know that such tactics have no effect. I turn the guard’s head away from me.
“Did you notice how the guard—what’s his name?”
“Magnan,” Katzman says. “Mike Magnan.”
“Did you notice how Mike was acting when he came in the room?”
“Squirrelly,” Dearborn says, and I think he already understands what the others have failed to grasp. When he takes two steps back, I’m sure of it.
Katzman motions to the video screen showing the angry mob, who is now encircling the building. “Everyone in this building should be afraid.”
“Mike was a security guard here. Trained to deal with tough situations, yes? With the Dread?”
I take Katzman’s lack of reply as confirmation.
“But he was acting like a panicked mouse. I don’t know the man
, so I’m just guessing, but that’s a bit out of character for Mr. Magnan.”
“It is,” Katzman says. “You think the Dread got to him.”
“I know they did.” I stand up and turn to Winters. “Help Katz stand Mike up.”
She listens, and the pair hoists the unconscious man up.
I walk behind them. “Try to keep him still or I might not be the only person with a part of his brain missing.”
“Wait, wh—”
Ignoring Katzman, I slip into the world between, focusing past the pain. The small Dread, like some kind of headless bat with hooked talons on the ends of its leathery, red-veined wings, hovers in the air, little tentacles lowered into Mike’s head. Whether the tendrils are making physical contact inside his head, I can’t tell, but it looks that way. I snap out with my hand, grab hold of the Dread, and yank. It comes free in my hand, flailing without a sound. The thing has no mouth.
Clutching the Dread in both hands, I slip back out of the world in between, focusing on the little creature, feeling its frequency resisting my influence, and then bending to it. I’m winded, tense with pain, and once again naked except for the plastic pendant. I really need to start trying to bring my clothes along for the ride.
But this time, no one is interested in my statue-of-David impersonation. They can see I’m holding something, and I can feel it, still struggling to escape.
“Fair warning,” I say. “There is a small Dread in my hands. I think only one of you should take a look, just in case. Would be a shame if all of you went mental at the same time.”
“Don’t look at me,” Dearborn says, already peeking through his fingers.
“I’ll do it,” Winters says, while she and Katzman lay Mike on the floor.
“Not a chance,” Katzman says. “It’s my job to—”
“You’ve been exposed too many times already,” Winters argues. “I’m your shrink, remember? I know how hard the strain is, and I know more coping mechanisms than—”
Fuck it.
I open my hands.
They all see it.
There is a fraction of a second when everyone leans back, collectively draining half the room’s oxygen, when I think I’ve made a mistake. But they recover quickly, one by one, leaning in to look at the small Dread, whose natural ability to instill fear has been negated by being fully present in this frequency. But it’s also not pushing fear at the moment. There’s no whispering. Maybe that won’t work here, either?
“Why isn’t it going back?” Allenby asks.
“Perhaps the Dread need to be tethered to the mirror dimension.” Lyons looks excited, on the verge of discovery. “Even when they physically attack, they never fully emerge from their world.”
“That would explain why physical confrontations in myth never end with the monster simply disappearing,” Dearborn says. “If they fully enter our world, maybe they’re stuck here? That would also explain why they don’t launch a full-scale physical assault.”
“But I can move between worlds,” I point out. “Why not them?”
“You are no longer just human,” Lyons says. “Though you are no less human than you were before. You are more than human, in tune with multiple frequencies.”
“So it can’t leave?” Katzman asks.
I pinch both of its wings, about to snap the life out of it.
“No!” Lyons says. “Don’t! I need to study it.” He reaches out his shaking hands, and I drop the little creature onto the soft flesh of his palms. It tries to flap free, but he folds his meaty digits over the thing, holding it in place.
“Josef,” Allenby whispers to me. She points at me and then the floor, waggling her finger up and down, without actually looking directly at me. Clothes, right. I quickly cover myself with Stephanie’s lab coat while Lyons heads to the door. Slightly more decent, I take hold of his arm and ask, “What should we do about them?”
“Huh?” He’s lost in thought, more confused by his return to the here and now than I am when I move between worlds. Granted, my quick adjustment to the strangeness that is my life is thanks to a malformed amygdala, but you’d think he wouldn’t have forgotten the angry mob ready to reenact the storming of Dr. Frankenstein’s castle. “Oh,” he says, looking at the large monitor. “Right.”
“Reasoning with them will be impossible,” Winters says. “If they were driven here by the Dread, they’re already beyond logical thought. Whatever fears they might have had about this place already—the strange building with armed guards and an electrified fence—have been magnified to an irrational level.”
“Have we heard from the guards at the front gate?” I ask.
“They fell back to the building,” Katzman says. “Even if they were authorized to open fire on the public, which they’re not, there’s nothing they could have done against that many people. We’re cut off.”
“You’re cut off,” I point out, and then ask, “How do the Dread operate? To drive a mob of people like a herd of cattle, they have to be coordinated, right? Something is in charge. Giving the orders.”
They just look at me. It was a stupid question. How could they know? They can’t even look at the things, let alone understand their command structure, if there is one. So I offer up my own theory. “On the other side, anytime I’m near a Dread, I hear whispering. But it’s not in my ears. It’s in my head. I also hear it when they’re pushing their fear. I think it’s a kind of psychic communication that’s broadcast out to all Dread, or people, in the area. It might be how they boost fear and direct it. It was the most powerful near the colony.”
“You saw the colony?” Lyons spits the words like he’s just gagged on hot coffee.
“To the south. Like you thought.”
The old man squints at me, looking suspicious. “How many other details did you leave out?”
At least nine small ones, I think, but shrug. “Slipped my mind.”
Katzman sits down at the security console. Mashes some keys. The video feed minimizes, replaced by a map of New Hampshire. He zooms in, zeroing in on the square shape of the Neuro building. “How far did you go?”
“I’m not sure,” I say, “but it was the first real clearing I came to. Never crossed a road. It was a cemetery in the real world.”
“Yeah,” Katzman says. “The colonies you found … before, were built atop our dead.” The map scrolls south. Endless woods, patches of pines, birch, maples and oaks.
“It’s why people feel an impending sense of doom while inside a graveyard,” Dearborn says. “Well, that and all the dead people. We’re not sure why they built colonies on top of cemeteries, though.”
“Stay objective,” Allenby says. “We don’t know if the cemetery comes first, or the colony. It’s just as likely, given the feeling of supernatural dread we feel in the presence of a colony, that we are drawn to bury our dead in the earth where their colonies already existed.”
The satellite view suddenly shifts between fall and summer, the barren trees suddenly full of thick green leaves. I wonder if the foliage will make the clearing harder to see, but then it appears on the screen, impossible to miss, several miles across. The green grass is pocked by hundreds of gray rectangles.
Katzman zooms the image in closer. Gravestones. “Got it.”
I turn to Lyons, who still looks ready to run out the door with his prize. “I think we should hit the colony. If it doesn’t stop the flow of information, at the very least it might distract the mob. At best…”
Whispering tickles my ears.
My eyes snap toward the Dread bat.
Shit.
Before Lyons understands what I’m doing, I’ve crossed the room and crushed the small creature between my hands and his. It’s as frail as it looks, cracking beneath the pressure. The whispers stop.
Lyons reels back. “W—why?”
“Word to the wise, I’m pretty sure they understand English.”
“You think that little thing can speak English?” Katzman says.
“They don’t speak at all,” I say. “Not like us. I said it could understand English.”
“They’re smart,” Dearborn says. “Probably smarter than we think. They just think differently than us. We view them as savages, the same way the first New World colonists viewed Native Americans. But it wasn’t their intelligence that was different. It was culture, and values, and ours most certainly differ from the Dread.”
“Exactly,” I say, offering the lanky man a nod of thanks. “I heard the whispers … in my head. I think it was trying to warn the colony. Or whatever is outside. The bull might have even made contact before the…” I stop myself. There’s no time for an argument. “The point is, if we can disrupt whatever is coordinating the Dread from the colony, they might stop instigating this little rebellion.”
“But there’s no way to test your theory,” Allenby says.
I grin. “There’s one way.”
30.
“Are you sure about this?” Allenby hands me a freshly loaded magazine, which I tuck into a pouch on my belt. I’ve got two more just like it already in place next to the black sound-suppressed P229 handgun on my hip. But the rounds aren’t for that gun, they’re for the .50 caliber Desert Eagle handgun on the countertop. Like everything else in this armory, it’s made of oscillium. Even the clothing and body armor I’m now wearing were created using thin fibers of the stuff. It’s flexible and light, but strong, and because of the ease with which it changes string frequencies, it will shift between dimensions without any extra effort, which is good because we won’t have a bodiless suit running around revealing my location.
After stowing three magazines, I slap a fourth magazine into the Desert Eagle and slide it into a chest holster. “Would it matter if I wasn’t sure?”
“I might worry less.”
I pick up my machete and inspect the weapon. There isn’t a knick on it, in any frequency. I run my thumb across the blade. Razor-sharp. The encounter with the bull’s armor and thick bones didn’t leave a mark. Oscillium is tough stuff.
“Were we close?” I ask. “Before all this?”
“Yeah,” she says. “We were. When you were young.”
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