“Matt, new orders.”
“Sir?”
“I want you and Mr. Tancredy to get in touch with this British ag—” His tongue refuses to say the word agent—“Person, and set up a meeting. Figure out how to do it safely—pick them up and bring them to me, then drop them off afterwards, I mean.”
“Are you sure about this, sir?” Mattingley’s expression is grim.
“Yeah, I’m sure.” The President is silent for a minute. “The OPA have put me in a box: I need to break out. If the devil himself offered me a treaty right now, the only question I’d ask would be whether they put him up to it. So let’s find out what they want, and hope their help costs less than my soul.”
* * *
I have a mission to run, and it’s mostly still on track except for that one troublesome element, which is the inside of my head.
I have trust and abandonment issues. Put it down to my shitty privileged family background. When my parents divorced, Dad remarried and got religion and moved to Australia. He didn’t want to deal with a teenage daughter. I mean, he didn’t exactly wash his hands of me—he paid child support on time—but he wasn’t interested in dealing with teenage me on my own terms. Either I agreed to come live with him in the arse end of Queensland and attend his church and be his idea of an obedient Christian daughter, or I could go live with Mum. Meanwhile, Mum had her own ideas of what she wanted to do with her life. I think she was secretly embarrassed that she’d gotten married at twenty-two and had her first baby at twenty-three and another at thirty, and then she wanted a second chance. Jenny, being nine, was manageable in a way that I, prickly and awkward at seventeen, wasn’t. So while I wasn’t exactly homeless or starving, Mum mostly ignored me. It was made clear that I had to make my own way, be strong and independent as soon as possible. I spent my first decade as an adult owning my mistakes, although luckily I avoided Mum’s particular marital mishap—shacking up with an early-twenties partner did not work out for me—but I never got the kind of support most people seem to expect from their family.
I’ve known Jim for a couple of years—since we worked together in TPCF management—and we’ve had this friends-with-benefits thing going on for about six months. I’m pretty certain that if it wasn’t for the shitty state of the world, and the fact that I’ve got PHANGs and he’s a superhero, it’d be rather more than a casual fling. So when the PM put Jim’s name on the list for this operation, it seemed like an all-around good idea for us to do joint cover for our part of the job. We both got into the spirit of things, and it was all fun and games until … well, you know what happened. Silly me, I knew it was too good to be true, so why am I surprised it exploded in my face?
It’s three o’clock in the morning and we’re alone in the living room. Janice and Derek are elsewhere in the house. I admit I may have snarled at them until they went away. I’m lying on the sofa about two meters from the edge of Jim’s containment grid, staring at the LEDs flickering on the router, and I’m wondering what it will feel like to die.
He’s safe for now, locked inside the eye-warping absence of light that is the containment zone for another seven minutes. It’s on a timer. While it’s up, he’s safe. But it’s got to shut down for ten minutes to let air circulate so he doesn’t suffocate. While it’s down, the enemy V-parasites could start up again at any moment, killing him. About five hours ago we got a coded message. Because the mission is still on track we’re going to have to pull him out and repurpose the grid for its intended use in the morning—as anchor for one end of a field-expedient ley line. Unless Janice can work some kind of fucking miracle we won’t be able to protect him and simultaneously do the job we came for.
My Fuckboy is probably going to die today, and the worst thing about it—about me—the thing that I hate about myself, is that I’m angry with him for letting me down. It’s infantile, I know, but he’s mine. He’s not allowed to die. I’m not here, I’m not in this situation, I’m not about to go through the any-last-wishes interview, the how-did-you-rate-your-employment-experience out-processing with him. It’s all so fucking unreal.
I continue to stare at the flickering LEDs, and it takes me a while to realize that the lights themselves are burning steadily, and it’s my eyes that are watering and making them flicker. I wipe my eyes. This waiting is bad for me. Why didn’t we pare the exposure window to the bone while we were planning this? (Because airliners get delayed or diverted, and cars and trains get held up by traffic and accidents, of course. Contingency time is useless wasted time, right until you need it.) I blink again, and between my eyes closing and reopening the black hemisphere vanishes and I’m looking at Jim lying on an air mattress, gazing in my direction.
“Hey,” he says, with a tired smile.
“Hey yourself.” I pat the sofa beside me. “Come on over? We’ve got ten minutes.” My heart somersaults, because really we might only have ten seconds … or not. But we can’t keep the dome up the whole time or he’ll suffocate.
“Better idea, why don’t you join me? Uh. Toilet break,” he adds, standing up. I notice he hasn’t used the bucket in the grid. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
He stretches and strides out of the living room. I sit up and inhale deeply. There’s a stale, heavy odor, like a bedroom that hasn’t been aired properly. I pick up my tablet and walk over to his nest. Bucket, air mattress, USB-rechargeable camping lantern, extra booster batteries. Right. I make myself useful by swapping in fully topped-up cells and plugging the old ones into the charger while I wait to hear a toilet flush. Two minutes gone and he’s still alive. I have an eerie, momentary flashback: I’m standing beside Mr. Kadir who is strapped to the execution table, his expression blank and slightly disgusted as I fill sample tubes from the vein in his arm. Only instead of the crap terrorist wannabe it’s Jim’s face looking up at me. I shudder convulsively and swallow. How could he do this to me? To us? I close my eyes and practice mindful introspection. Not his fault, I tell myself. It was enemy action. But I can’t put a face to them, so I’m unconsciously channeling it towards the nearest target, even though it’s inappropriate.
I’m still doing the deep-breathing thing when the door opens and Jim pads back in. He’s shed his shoes and socks, I realize. “Hey again. How long have I got out of the box?”
I check my phone. “Six minutes, then in you go.”
He walks over to the air mattress and drops down into a cross-legged squat. “C’mere.”
For a moment I balk, but then I realize it almost certainly doesn’t matter if I get trapped inside the grid when it powers up again. I’ll be stuck until six, but showtime isn’t until some time in mid-morning, for maximum inconvenience to folks like me. I walk over and sit down next to him.
“So,” I say, then find I’ve run out of words.
“So,” he agrees, his expression grave. He glances at the USB batteries and the lantern. “Hang on.” He picks up the lantern and switches it on. “It gets really dark when the grid powers up,” he explains. “I got caught out the first time.”
“Yes, well.” I lock eyes with him and we’re both silent for a precious minute.
“How much—” He shakes his head. “Let me rephrase: What happens next?”
“We—” I swallow and reach for the tablet. “I’m supposed to conduct an exit interview. I kid you not.”
“An exit interview?”
“You’re—” His double-take would be comical at any other time. “Seriously?”
I nod. “If an employee quits for any reason we’re meant to record a bunch of details, basic Q&A stuff for statistical analysis of HR trends. Obviously, it doesn’t apply to sudden violent deaths: it’s more a retirement or outplacing thing. But if someone has a terminal illness, that’s covered—in case it’s work-related. So, exit interview.” I shrug.
“Fuck.”
“It’s … I wasn’t expecting it so soon.” Or to be the only HR person in position to collect the data. “So, um, This Is Your Life…” I swallow again
. For some reason I’m having trouble holding my shit together. “Fuck it,” I say.
“I’m not dead yet: While there’s life there’s hope, right?”
“Not really.” I feel another flicker of irrational anger. “Listen, Jim, there are only a couple of ways out of this. We can try to stash you in a grid for the rest of your life, but that’s some real boy-in-the-bubble shit right there. Or we can hunt down and kill the PHANG who’s got her teeth into your gray matter, which might work—or it might just make their V-parasites finish you off on the spot. Nobody knows, because we’ve never done that. Maybe the alfär know, or the Nazgûl, but we don’t. Anyway, we have no way of tracking down that vampire—for all I know they’re back in New York. There’s a third option which we don’t talk about and which might not work because—again—we’ve never tried to do it to someone who’s already being parasitized, and finally there’s the door labelled FINAL EXIT. But options one and two”—the living room vanishes, replaced by a perfect blackness broken only by the pale glow of the lantern—“options one and two are vanishingly unlikely, you’ll hate yourself if you take option three, and option four is maybe hours to single-digit days away.”
Jim scoots round and stretches out beside me, crosses his arms behind his head, and smiles at me hopefully. “And then I suppose there’s an option number five, which we don’t talk about outside a powered-up grid?”
I roll over to face him. “There is no fifth option,” I tell him. Jim isn’t cleared for the stuff some of us only talk about inside secure grids, with no written notes. The die-before-disclosing stuff. But I’m not lying to him about this. “No secret trapdoor, no last-minute reprieve. You’re trapped in here with me and I’m one of the monsters, remember?”
Jim turns on his side so we’re lying nose to nose. He reaches over with his free arm and places his hand against the small of my back. I have the sniffles. “Don’t cry,” he says softly. I’ve upset him now, and that only makes it harder to stop.
“You don’t want option three,” I manage.
“Let me be the judge of that.” He pulls me close and I bury my face against his shoulder. “I’ve … I think I’ve got a handle on the downsides. But just in case I’m wrong, tell me, hypothetically, how would it work?”
* * *
There’s a Sheriff’s Department cruiser with flashing lights parked outside the WOCZ-FM building when Brains pulls into the car park. “Lights, action, story,” Pete murmurs as he turns on the cabin light, cracks his window, and puts his hands on the dash. (They’ve been briefed about how to interact with American law enforcement: staying in the vehicle feels really weird—it’s the exact opposite of the routine for a British traffic stop—but if it keeps things friendly, he’s all in favor of it.) The building door gapes open. An officer walks towards them, keeping his right hand close to his holster. “You can’t stop here—”
There are more flashing lights at the end of the street, coming closer. “Bill?” Gaby calls from the back seat. “Bill Murphy? Is that you?”
The sheriff’s deputy tenses. “Gaby.” He stares at Pete. “What’s going on?”
Pete smiles and crosses his fingers that Jon will keep her shit together. “Uh, hello, Officer? My friends and I are tourists. We took a wrong turn looking for our motel and nearly ran over Ms. Carson here, and her friend, who’s in a bad way, so we offered her a lift back here to meet the ambulance—”
And indeed there is an ambulance, turning into the car park with lights spinning and a sudden blare of air horns. Driving licenses and passports are presented, paramedics take one look at the unconscious Danni, and Deputy Murphy undergoes a remarkable change of attitude. Crested Butte is a small town, and Gaby and the deputy went to the same high school. Having someone he knows reassure the deputy that they’re just good Samaritans passing by is better than any diplomatic credentials.
Jon keeps her head down and manages not to fidget too conspicuously while Murphy and his partner fire questions at Pete, Brains, and Gaby. For some reason they don’t notice her sitting in the middle of the back seat, doing whatever it is she does that sets Pete’s ward tingling. Magic of some kind, he assumes, then sets the thought aside as he does his best to look like an over-helpful tourist. The cover story they agreed on is very simple. They’re traveling off the interstate because they want to see the country. Having taken a wrong turn they were flagged down by Gaby, who was staying with an unconscious Danni. Her story is the hard part, and took Jon most of the drive back into town to bind to her tongue. It sticks as close to the truth as possible without mentioning gunfire and burning bodies on the lakeshore. Men in Black came to the studio and abducted her and Danni. She doesn’t know what happened to Glenn; they argued, and then dumped the two women on a back road. She thinks it was a robbery attempt gone wrong. Pay no attention to the strangely helpful tourists behind the curtain of mind-fog spread by the alien magus. Given that Crested Butte is the kind of place where the sheriff’s deputies carry shotguns loaded for Bigfoot in the trunk and the locals believe in dragons, the only unusual thing about the Men in Black is the lack of a prior UFO visit.
Eventually Danni is strapped to a stretcher, loaded into the back of the ambulance, and driven off to Gunnison Valley Hospital, thirty miles away. The officers have already been through the studio. “They didn’t take nothing,” Deputy Murphy says, shaking his head. “This is your purse isn’t it, Gaby?”
Gaby nods. “May I…?”
“Here y’are, ma’am.” He hands it over without comment. “Is anything missing?”
Gaby roots through it. “Phone, cards, lipstick. Huh, what do you know?” She holds her keyfob up. “It all looks to be here.”
“Well, if that’s so…” Murphy glances at his car. “Listen, we need to go find Glenn. Will you be all right locking up here?”
Gaby nods. “I’ve got a couple of calls to make before I go home, but these kind people offered me a ride, and their friend”—a nod at the back seat—“was asking after a look around the studio. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
The skin on Pete’s neck crawls as his ward lights up, responding to the backwash from the wave of you gotta believe me boiling off Jon. Deputy Murphy’s gaze defocuses. “Give the dispatcher a call if you figure where Glenn’s gotten to, ma’am. If you’re sure you’ll be okay we’ll be on our way now. I’ll need to ask you some questions tomorrow, for the follow-up.”
He turns and sleepwalks back to the cruiser, and his partner drives off without a backward glance. Gaby stands motionless and slack-jawed in the car park. “Hey, don’t overdo it,” Pete tells Jon.
“Overdo? What?” Jon peers at him from under her blonde-dyed fringe. “Overdo?”
“We don’t turn people into puppets, Jon, it’s bad manners.” He gestures at Gaby. “We need her to let us in so we can do the job, that’s all.”
“Oh.” Jon climbs down from the Escalade and stretches. “The job. The job. The job.”
Brains shares a worried glance with him. Is she coming apart? he mouths. Pete shrugs.
“Gaby?” Pete asks. “Can you show us around? Like you promised?”
Gaby shakes herself. “What? Oh, I was asleep on my feet, dreaming. It was really strange…” She blinks. “Are you coming?”
Brains grabs a small suitcase from the trunk of the SUV and follows Gaby inside. Pete and Jon trail behind. Gaby drifts through the studio offices as if sleepwalking, but is awake enough to gesture at each room and explain its function. It’s a surprisingly small office suite, but, as she explains, 90 percent of their content is syndicated from Sinclair or Clear Channel. WOCZ may be one of the rare stations that is still independently owned and operated, but the invisible monkey’s paw of the advertising industry has brought them to heel, just like the big chains. There are two remaining broadcast studios, only one of which is in use at any time. Here’s the server room and the phone switch. Here’s the mixing desk and the no-longer-used rack of canned signature tapes, kept more as historic memorabilia tha
n for any utility. Routers and decoders for the satellite systems. There’s a transmitter on the roof, but the main FM broadcast mast is halfway up a mountain a couple miles out of town. And this is the break room.
“You look tired,” Pete comments. “Wouldn’t you like a nice hot coffee?”
In her hypnotic haze Gaby is highly suggestible. “I’d love one,” she says. “Wouldn’t you? Here’s where we keep the supplies—”
She doesn’t see Brains open his suitcase and set up his tools in the machine room, or see him disconnect the SAGE ENDEC unit from the Emergency Alert System rack, slide it out, and unscrew the top of its case. She’s busy setting up the drip machine and asking Pete how he and his friends take their coffee, and Pete is only too happy to keep her distracted while Brains replaces the PROM on the main circuit board with one he flashed in the motel room the evening before. It doesn’t take long. Gaby is showing Pete the broadcast suite when Brains ambles inside and picks up his mug.
“Back with us?” Pete asks, unable to quite keep the edge out of his voice.
“Sure.” Brains nods. “Restroom break,” he says in Gaby’s direction, although she’s so absorbed in a monotone explanation of her program format that it’s anyone’s guess whether she got the hint.
Pete nods encouragingly at Gaby and sips his coffee, then glances at Jon. “That’s enough,” he tells her. “We should drink up and go; it’s getting late and we’ve got a long way to travel tomorrow.”
The Labyrinth Index Page 24