So of course she scowls furiously when Glenn gives her the lead-in and she cues up track one on tonight’s playlist, “Video Killed the Radio Star.”
“Good evening. This is Gaby Carson, coming to you on WOCZ with tonight’s episode of The Whatever Show, here in Crested Butte, Ground Zero of high weirdness in America. And we’re going to be talking about whatever scares you awake in the middle of the night, but particularly the supernatural—zombies, vampires, and brain slugs. With me tonight are Danni—”
“Hi!”
“—and Glenn, and also Glenn’s brain slug, which insisted I play “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles just now. Say hello, Glenn’s brain slug.”
“All glory to the Hypnotoad.”
“I’ll take that as brain-slug for hi. Calls are open now, and I’m waiting to hear from you if you’ve ever seen a zombie, vampire, or a trademarked Futurama character here in Crested Butte!”
And it’s into track number two, “Scary Monsters.”
Gaby sits back. On the other side of the console Danni is listening on her headset while Glenn fiddles with the ASCAP playlist sheet. “Got one for you,” Danni tells her: “Billy from Baxter’s Gulch.”
“And our first caller of the evening is Billy from Baxter’s Gulch,” Gaby fades down the music. “So, Billy, zombies or vampires?”
“Ain’t got nuthin’ like zombies or vampires round these parts.”
Billy has a three-packs-a-day rasp and sounds defensive, which is a bad start, so Gaby gives him a gentle shove: “So what do you have, Billy?”
“Nothin’, ’cept a couple of hours ago jes’ before sunset I was out chopping firewood an’ I looked up and saw me a dragon.” Suddenly her constipated caller unblocks in a rush: “It came over the north ridge ’bout a hunnerd feet up an’ it had bat wings outta here an’ a long tail with a stinger at the end an’ it was moving fast, like a hunnert, hunnert and fifty miles an hour. I only got a glimpse of it, it was an’ over the treeline faster than a greased hog’s—”
“—Whizzings,” Gaby interrupts hurriedly—Glenn has them on a ten-second delay loop but he gets itchy if she counts on him to bleep the show too often—“Listen, Billy, that’s really cool but, are you sure it was a dragon? Could it have been maybe a drone or a light plane instead? Or, I dunno, a buzzard? I don’t wanna rain on your parade but—”
“—I know me a buzzard an’ I know what a light plane looks like an’ this was no plane, missy! It had wings like a bat an’ scales on its body, an’ a mass o’ tentacles for a face, an’ it hissed like a snake! I know what I’s seen and I’s seen a dragon!”
“That’s really interesting, Billy.” Gaby mutes him: “Listeners, have you seen a dragon flying down Baxter’s Gulch at dusk? If so, I’d like to hear from you!” On the screen in front of her Glenn has rapidly shuffled the playlist around and she nods at him as she brings up “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons. Two thumbs up. As it plays, the phone lines light up until both Danni and Glenn are busy screening calls.
“Lot of dragons tonight,” Glenn tells her. He looks perturbed.
“Yeah, well, give ’em to me. Caller number two, you’re on air!”
“Hi, this is Erika, up near Lake Grant”—country-club territory, and Erika’s breathless party-girl delivery gives way to a squeal—“I saw the dragon, I saw it, too! It’s really big but not like the ones on Game of Thrones, I mean it has no legs and a big bundle of squirmy worms for a head and oh my gosh, it’s out here now! Circling over the club! It’s so exciting! Oh look, Biff—” (inaudible)—“smartphone, film it now! It’s coming back, do you think it’s friendly—”
Gaby stares at Glenn for a horrible dead-air second as Glenn shrugs helplessly. “Well, it looks like Erika hung up on us, folks,” she extemporizes. “Sorry ’bout that. Next caller, you are…?”
“I’m Adam from Gunnison an’ I don’ believe in no dragons.” A glutinous swallowing sound, and Gaby winces. “The good book says our Lord sent an angel, and he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, and bound him a thousand years in hell because he’s Satan, so if ya’ll seeing a dragon tonight it means our Lord has returned and so’s Old Nick—”
Adam is off-air as Glenn mashes the panic button and goes straight into “Fire of Unknown Origin,” which should buy them a couple of minutes while Gaby leads into the first ad break and Glenn and Danni play “hunt the sane caller” for her. Gaby looks at her mike in disbelief. “What is in the air tonight?” she demands.
“Dragons,” Danni giggles.
“Dragons.” Gaby makes a curse of the word. “What have you got for me?” she asks Glenn.
“Next caller is Sheila from up near Italian Mountain. You’re on-air in two seconds, Sheila. Go.”
Sheila is stressed out and her voice wobbles: “You’ve got to send help, the phones are down and all I got is cell service! There’s a fire on the hillside just above Skyland and it’s like to go wild if we don’t get the Fire Department out!”
Across the desk from Gaby, Glenn sits up straight and looks alarmed. Gaby collects herself before she speaks. “Sheila, I hear you and”—her eyes flicker at Danni, who is dialing the emergency dispatcher—“we’re calling them now.” (This had better not be a hoax or your ass is so going to get kicked, she thinks silently.) “What can you tell us about the wildfire?”
“It’s not, not a wildfire! This flying thing came over, it was swooping along above Slate River and it sprayed napalm or something all over the Lodge! There’s cars on fire and half the hillside’s ablaze! It flew off and Jack Silver tried to drive over to see if he could help but then it came back and oh my God his station wagon, it went up like a tiki torch—”
Sheila is still rattling along on the gibbering edge of panic but then Glenn cuts in, earning a glare from Gaby until she hears him say, “Folks, this is The Whatever Show on WOCZ with an urgent announcement for everyone in the Lake Grant area. We have a major incident and a possible forest fire. The Fire Department and Sheriff’s Department are responding. Please stay off the roads for now, we need to keep them clear for emergency vehicles, but you should pack your bags and be ready to drive out when, and only when, the Fire Marshall says you should evacuate. I repeat: sit tight, but be prepared to get out if an evacuation is called.”
Danni, across the desk from Gaby, is pale but focussed, listening to someone on the phone. Gaby plugs in and hears the tail-end of Deputy Landau’s call—“not a hoax, we have a no-shit fire-breathing thing up here and it’s attacking the Skyland Lodge—”
The line goes dead. Glenn stares at Gaby, wide-eyed. Gaby shakes herself and cues up “Light My Fire,” the Shirley Bassey remix version. “Emergency plan,” Glenn mouths at her, and she nods. It’s going to be a very long night.
* * *
Hours later, Sam Penrose shuffles into the lobby of the Walmart closest to the safe house in the suburbs of DC where his team is standing watch.
Sam is in his early thirties, trim and clean-cut, with the kind of fireplug build that comes with habits learned during a tour of duty in the military. Not to put too fine a point on it, he looks like a plainclothes cop in casual dress, which is more or less what he is, if the cop in question had just been subjected to a week or two of systematic sleep-deprivation torture. There are baggy pouches under his eyes, his stubble has raced past six o’clock at least twice, there is an exhausted slump to his shoulders, and his gaze is bloodshot. His chinos may have been pressed once, and his polo shirt is still passably clean, but a sour odor of desperation rises off him. Whenever he stops moving he sways back and forth very slowly, like a dead poplar just waiting for the right moment to topple over in the forest.
This being a Walmart, Sam’s state of exhaustion is not entirely out of place. A number of the other shoppers are wearing their pajamas and shuffling like extras in a zombie flick. He drags a shopping cart free of the gridlock by the entrance and pushes it into the giant fluorescent-lit cavern, leaning tiredly on the handlebar as he peers at his ph
one, which is displaying a shopping list.
Twelve days, Sam thinks, trying not to mutter aloud. Two days to go. He’s looking for the bulky stuff first—paper goods—and as he trawls up and down the endless aisles he twitches, for every so often he senses someone stalking him. But whenever he looks round, or blinks, or pinches himself, there’s no one there. And blinking is hazardous. If he blinks it feels so good that his eyelids try to stay closed and his consciousness goes sideways and tries to escape out his ears. Sam has spent twelve consecutive days on Modafinil, generic Provigil—a wonder drug for students who need to cram all night before an examination, or fighter pilots who need a “go-pill” to help them fly an eighteen-hour strike mission. But drugs will only get you so far before REM deprivation kicks in, and Sam is clinging to the end of his rope by his fingernails. He’s been hallucinating for the past week, hearing the voices of ghosts and seeing things that aren’t there. He’d go to sleep right in the middle of the store aisle, if only he could be sure of waking up again.
Shopping list: toilet paper, a 36-pack of rolls, kitchen towels, a 4-pack. Bread, 6 loaves. Milk, 2 gallons. And 12 frozen pizzas, 24 ready meals, 2 pounds of butter, 12 of the live yoghurt drinks that she likes, 16 pounds of hamburger patties, a smoked ham, 2 dozen eggs, a few different cheeses. Then a pack of light bulbs, bathroom cleaner, and on to the clothing aisles and a bunch of basics they need. Sam is shopping for a dozen people holed up in a safe house with eight bedrooms and the curtains shut and two standing watch at all hours, sleepless because they’re terrified that if any of them go to sleep, something bad will happen.
If only he could remember what.
As he lurches down the household-goods aisle towards the fenced-off cantonment where they keep the firearms and ammunition, the icy claws of dread scrabble at Sam for attention. He hasn’t been home in months, Jenna will have forgotten he even exists—why do I know that? he asks himself—paychecks aren’t being deposited in his account but—Continuity of Government—he’s still on duty. I should phone my parents, the dull voice of filial duty nags in one of his ears, and for a moment he’s half certain he’s hallucinating his own conscience telling him to do that. Dad will know what I should do, what I’m doing here. Dad will help. Except Dad, Lieutenant Brad Penrose (USN, Retired, would be seventy-two at his next birthday), died of lung cancer three years ago.
This mission stinks, he thinks wearily, as he produces ID—forged by the very best, nobody forges identity paperwork like the US Treasury Secret Service’s counterforgery unit, they know all the best tricks—and signs for five hundred rounds of 357. (If they’re going to be in the field much longer, their certification is going to expire. At least with practice ammo Matt can maybe send his people to a private range in the neighborhood, and subsequently confirm that they’ve been keeping up their training. One less reprimand to face once this clusterfuck blows over.)
Sam is street-savvy, and trained to recognize threats—but he is less effective when his brain is baked to a crisp and lulled into a false sense of familiarity by the dull ambiance of a big box store. Shopping is the true religion of Middle America, and this Walmart is the most eclectic of mega-churches, perpetually understaffed and a bit unkempt, with stock flowing off the shelves and piles of stripped packaging forming cardboard snowdrifts in corners. The shuffling crowds pushing their carts and corralling their bored and fractious children are so familiar that they seem to phase in and out of invisibility beneath his tired gaze. So he is almost at the check-out line before he notices the odd, silvery mannequins.
He’s walked past at least half a dozen of them dotted around the store in the past quarter hour: human-sized and human-shaped dummies wearing metallic silver body stockings. But it’s only when he pauses to stand in line that he focuses on the mannequin standing by the door and realizes that the dummy’s lycra stretches over a very small paunch, and its rib cage is moving.
In a perspective flip that would be dizzying enough even if he wasn’t exhausted and hallucinating, Sam realizes that they are not dummies but people. People wearing skin-tight silver from head to foot, standing still as statues. He remembers a news article or a what-will-they-think-of-next briefing paper or something about zentai—full-body spandex suits for sports mascots and superheroes and people with a skin-tight shiny fetish. These dummies can’t possibly be superheroes—not standing watch in a Walmart, anyway. Is this some kind of promotion? he puzzles. It wouldn’t be the first: last month you couldn’t fight your way past the front door without running a gauntlet of goofy Left Shark impersonators.
But now that he’s noticed the faceless, silver-suited man behind the row of checkouts, he slowly realizes that there are more than one. And although it’s hard to tell—their eyes and mouths are completely hidden by masks of stretchy silver fabric and they’re standing very still—they seem to be watching everyone entering and leaving the store.
A cold shudder runs up Sam’s spine and he realizes the leather pouch he wears on a thong under his polo shirt has grown uncomfortably warm. The silver suit nearest to his queue is male. About five yards down the store, there’s a female figure, gracefully posed as any store dummy—but a shop dummy would be modeling sale items, wouldn’t it? As he watches, she shifts her weight from her left hip to her right. Five yards past her there’s another silver suit, and then another …
They’re looking for Arthur, he realizes. A trickle of sweat runs down his ribs. The cashier is finishing up with the tightly curled older lady in front of him. What to do? He’s not carrying his P229, concealed or open. His phone is a burner, never connected to a public carrier. If it looks like someone’s going to follow him back to the safe house it’s his duty to fall asleep before they can take him alive. But the team really needs these supplies. The last time anyone broke cover to stock up on provisions was four days ago. Mal didn’t mention any zentai-suited weirdos staking out Costco—they never use the same store twice—but if this is a new angle, Senior Officer Mattingley needs to know. You could phone home, Dad whispers in his ear as one of the silver suits sweeps its face slowly across the row of checkouts, its occult gaze drifting past. Let a real grown-up handle it. Sam is thirty-four, a Special Officer in the US Secret Service, married to Jenna (if she still remembers him), father of Brad Jr. and Kyle, and hasn’t slept for twelve days. It doesn’t get much more grown-up than—You’re too tired for this, a pernicious ghost whispers in his ear, and Sam yawns convulsively, his jaw cracking.
“Next!” squawks the cashier, staring at him blearily, and he pulls himself together. He unloads his cart onto the belt and she scans everything briskly, almost too fast for him to keep up. He shovels everything back into the cart as she rings up the bill and he manages to drop the prepaid credit card. Bending down, he yawns again but collects it and hands it over. “Tired, huh?” the cashier asks unsympathetically.
“Yeah. Been a long day.” The longest. You should really get some sleep, his grandfather’s shade whispers behind his left shoulder. Not helpful, he thinks reproachfully. The ward around his neck is buzzing. It feels painfully hot where it lies against his sternum. The Secret Service doesn’t have many left, now that the special office inside the Postal Inspectorate has gone dark. He pays and trudges towards the vestibule beneath the masked haze of the zentai guardians, each step feeling like a mile-long forced march.
Transferring the spoils to the cargo bed of the elderly F-150 is bad enough. Driving home is a special kind of torture, forcing Sam to maintain situational awareness and check for tails. A couple of times, he finds himself drifting out of his lane and opens his eyes to the blaring horns of alarmed drivers. He’s not sleeping, merely drowning in fatigue toxins. His eyes burn and he feels as ancient as the mountain peaks beyond the horizon.
The hallucinations seem to come more frequently as he drives. Once, he glimpses a faceless mannequin at the wheel of a supermarket chain’s truck. Later he catches a flash of bland-faced silver inside a parked highway patrol car, staring out across the highwa
y. The doors of perception are hanging ajar without need for drugs, and shadows cast by a light other than the sun seem to twitch and jitter just outside his field of vision. He turns on the radio to try and stay awake but its station-seeking is faulty, and it repeatedly cycles between newscasters warning of a forest fire and a preacher wailing about the end of the world. Eventually he gives up and hits the CD autochanger, but it’s loaded with Senior Officer Mattingley’s college rock collection and he’s heard of a van that is loaded with weapons, packed up and ready to go … Sam shudders convulsively and kills the music right before the next stanza, but his brain serenades him with it regardless: heard of some grave sites, out by the highway, a place where nobody knows.
Sam doesn’t crash or drive off the highway, or miss his turn-off. He stays within spitting distance of the speed limit until he turns onto a side road, and finally brakes as he enters the driveway to the safe house. Fifty yards up the drive he pulls up and watches his rear-view for a full five minutes, timing it with his watch. There is a pistol in the map compartment under the dash, and much repetition has its location drilled into his muscle memory. But there’s no sign of pursuit. Eventually he yawns, then starts the engine again and drives on up the track to the weathered, shingle-fronted house with the drawn curtains and the discreet cameras hanging under the eaves. Reaching the front yard he turns the truck until it’s facing back down the drive, parks, and steps out of the cab to present himself to the front door.
The Labyrinth Index Page 5