A smudge near the cot turned out to be blood. Not only did we break in and messed up the church, we also found someone sleeping on the cot in the back, made him bleed a bit on the floor and took him for a ride. No concealing the deeds here, he thought, kneeling beside the cot and noting the blood’s freshness. Why?
He packed the gun and went back to the car, deep in thought. Outside the back door, under the wall crouched a black cat, seeking shelter from the rain.
It meowed and disappeared in the darkness of the hallway, as Brome dialed the police and started off, towards the rain and the city.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Over spicy beef, and later over shots of “Stolichnaya,” I told Paul the real story, starting from the cylindrical UFO “PillBottle-1” and ending in the news program I’d watched about myself at the North Side gay bar. Eating Chinese for the second time that day was nice, in a nostalgic sort of way, but the beef had nothing on the mighty “Stoli.” By the time I was done with food, I had to wrestle with myself not to continue the tale into play-by-play log of Iris’s visit. The honorable “I” finally won that fight, limiting the would-be story to an exuberant mention of me being in love.
Paul, on the other hand, showed surprising resilience to the Russian Tears. I say surprising, because back in college Paul had always been the one unconscious in the photos. Unconscious and naked from the waist up. But now I was the one feeling like my overpriced sofa was a tree-legged stool on some brig in the middle of a storm, and Pauly, like a sea wolf boatswain, with rum instead of blood in his veins, kept refilling the glasses with a steady, despite the gale, hand. He did believe my story on the first try, though, so I don’t know.
“Argh, man,” he said when I summed my tale up with yet another shot. “He’s fucking right.” He probably didn’t say, “Argh.”
“What?”
“The doctor… pastor guy. They want us to blow the place up.”
“Et tu, Brute? But why?”
“Why? Who the hell needs a ‘why’ when you have spaceships!”
“OK… Why don’t they do it themselves, then?”
“It’s more fun that way? I don’t know. They’re aliens for Pete’s sake. Next time you see one, ask’em.”
It was still early, but his logic was already beginning to wear down on me.
“You though,” he went on. “Why aren’t you in your Winger halfway down to nowhere? What, you think after seeing what you’ve seen, they’re just going to let you sit there eating shit on national TV with someone about commercials? I mean, boys who can change shape tried to kill you and you’re still alive. Never mind if they really were angels.”
“At least one of those things got whacked in the process. Maybe they don’t want to mess with me anymore.”
Paul gazed at me incredulously. “Is that supposed to be logic or humor? Either way, I think you’ve had one too many.”
“What, now I have to take logic lessons from Mr. Spaceships?”
“The dudes were there to kill you! What the hell changed since?”
“I was a wanted man, a murderer on the run. Now the public knows I am innocent.”
“The public knows! What good is that? You think they’re going to organize a protest rally when your corpse washes up on North Avenue beach? Demand a thorough investigation? Start a riot? Even if your glorious public farted all at once in outrage — and really, you’d have to be a little bigger than Luke Whales the snob TV star for your average Joe down in Des Moines to put down his ham on rye and open his mouth, not to mention lifting his fat ass from the couch — a twenty says the shape-shifting guys wouldn’t smell a whiff of it. And you wouldn’t care by then anyway, cos you’d be dead.”
“The public knows,” he scoffed again. “You work on TV. You should be the last one to rely on public and their knowledge. Think it’ll be hard to make the public ‘know’ you slit your wrists, because that new girlfriend of yours broke your heart? Or better yet, make them ‘know’ she was a junkie and shot you, because you refused to give her a hundred for a fix.”
“I have a gun,” I said and showed him the gun.
“There!” he shouted gleefully, almost dropping the bottle. “She could use your gun! That prick Dwayne Robinson will have an aneurysm. ‘The Cursed Gun Gets Its Owner!’”
This discussion wasn’t going as planned. Paul poured me a comforting shot, and I tossed it down my throat.
“Why…” I started, but had to pause to scrunch my face, as a mighty shudder shook me. “Why am I still alive?”
He thought about it. He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, man. Maybe they’re coming up with the best story to give to the vigilant public. Although… I’m surprised it’s taking them as long as it is.”
At that moment the door bell rang. Thankfully, I was drunk. Had I not been, I am afraid I would have discharged the weapon I still grasped and hurt somebody. Instead, Paul and I froze in our seats, staring at each other. Not really a rigid “froze,” more like a frozen gelatin.
It rang again.
“Shit,” I said. “Jeffrey.”
“Who’s Jeffrey?” Paul whispered. He was soberer than I and probably more scared.
“The concierge.”
“That him at the door?”
“No. He always warns me on intercom when someone’s coming up.”
“Maybe someone from the building then?” Which sounded like a rational enough idea. Only somehow I didn’t think so.
“Probably,” I said buoyantly and lifted the pistol. I got up from the couch and, leaving my shoes behind for stealth purposes, crept in socks to the door.
The bell rang again, urgently this time.
I pressed the camera button. A panel slid away, revealing the display and the corridor immediately in front of my door. Leaning on the wall with my back and holding the gun up high, I peered at it from an angle.
There was a man outside. A human. Or at least he looks human, I reminded myself. He was dressed in black suit and tie and would have looked like a fed, only I’d never seen an unshaven and uncombed fed. His dishevelment relaxed me somewhat. It was hard to imagine a shape-shifter disguising himself as an unshaven federal agent.
“Yes?” I asked the microphone. The man outside was just about to ring the bell again. Hearing my voice from the speaker, he turned to the camera. The camera zoomed in. Square face. Bags under blue eyes. Wrinkles.
“Mr. Whales?”
“Yes.”
He pulled out his wallet and flipped it open. “Special Agent Brome, FBI.”
Suddenly his dishevelment wasn’t very relaxing. I glanced back at Paul, who had risen from his chair and was standing on the first step that led out of the living room into the hallway. As our eyes met, his narrowed, and he moved his chin slightly to the left. He felt the same way.
“How do I know you’re really FBI?” I asked aloud.
“I am showing you my ID,” the man said patiently and moved the hand with the wallet a little bit from side to side.
“An ID is easily forged,” I parried, trying not to slur. I was bluffing, of course. I didn’t know the first thing about the degree of difficulty involved in the process of forging government-issued documents.
“I assure you mine is genuine.”
“I just came back from FBI,” I said. “I answered questions and had the impression we were quite done. Why didn’t they tell me an agent was coming to see me later?”
“I know you were there today, Mr. Whales. I read your statement. As to why they didn’t tell you I would be coming… they don’t know I’m here.”
“Why are you here?”
“I’d rather not discuss it through the door.” He put the wallet away, and as he did I glimpsed the handle of a gun in the under-arm holster. “I was the man you saw from the lawn in front of Dr. Young’s house.”
“Then how are you walking?”
“With a great deal of pain. If you let me in, I’ll gladly display the bruises on my back.”
&nbs
p; “I don’t like bruises,” I said, unlocking the door and pulling it towards me. And not too crazy about men’s backs either. Suddenly remembering, as he walked with a nod past me, I added, “Oh, and I have a gun in my hand behind the door here. I don’t want you to be alarmed by it and shoot me or something.”
He stopped and turned around, staring, as I pushed the door forward, revealing the pistol. He must have smelled the fumes, because he didn’t seem entirely at ease.
“I appreciate you telling me,” he said imploringly, like a regular fed in a police drama. “Now if you just put it away…”
“Already done,” I assured him and, seizing the gun by the barrel, went to the living room and put it on the magazine/drinking table. I showed the fed my hands. He came down the steps, giving the room a quick once-over and the TV, which was playing a cartoon on mute, a frown. I motioned for him to sit down and dropped on the couch. Across the table, Paul nodded in greeting, having magically reappeared in the armchair.
“Special Agent Brome,” I hastened to introduce. “My friend Paul.”
He eyed Paul interestedly, I thought even amusedly for a moment, then sat down on the opposite side of the couch, clasped his hands together and turned to me.
“Bullets fired from my gun got stuck in Lloyd Freud’s chest,” he stated flatly.
“Would you like a drink?” I asked.
“No, thanks,” he said. “Actually, yes.”
Paul poured vodka in his own shot glass and went to the cupboard to get another one. The fed downed a drink like he was chasing something with it.
“I didn’t shoot him,” he said.
“I know.”
“What did I shoot, Mr. Whales?”
“An alien,” Paul replied in passing. The agent looked up at him briefly and frowned.
“I see you were more liberal interpreting the night’s events to your friend, than to the agents of the federal government,” he said.
“Are you here to hear me repeat the same version?”
“Half-hoping you’d try it at least.”
“Why not just forget the whole thing like it never happened?”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Same reason you won’t be able to,” he said. “Because I, too, stopped taking pills.”
Even in the blur of alcoholic intoxication I suddenly saw he was right. I wondered how I had ever planned to really forget that night. Being with Iris might have worked to make me not think of it, but that wasn’t the same thing. It also dawned on me that the abovementioned alcoholic intoxication had very little in common with antidepressant intoxication and, from recent memory, even less with marijuana intoxication. I began to wonder how many different types of intoxication there were total and whether or not what we, the people, always considered the state of soberness was not simply another type of intoxication, which led me to the ponderous idea of death being, perhaps, the ultimate sobering, or, more optimistically, just a bad hangover, after which, with the help of sleep, shower and maybe coffee, the real sobering would follow. At this point I shook my head and awoke, so to speak, and found myself shocked most of all by the last phrase agent Brome had uttered.
“When?” I asked breathlessly.
“Some ten days ago. Almost lapsed today, after the trip to the local hospital.” He motioned for Paul to refill the glass.
“I don’t know what those things were,” I said as he dispatched another shot. “Someone told me they were angels.”
“There was more than one?”
“Two.”
“What happened to the other one?”
“Not sure. It got shot in the face… area… from a sawed-off shotgun.” He glanced at me with incredulity, but it was only a reflex. Understanding almost at once replaced it.
“And the one I shot? In other words, how did you get away?”
“That one got split in two by something. Then I don’t know. I passed out.”
“You fainted?”
“If you must call it that…”
“What happened next?”
“I became innocent.”
“Haven’t seen anything unusual since?”
“Not until you showed up on the door display.”
He studied me for a moment, nodded, leaned back in the couch, lifted his face up and groaned a long, tortured groan.
I stared at him in awe. It was such a simple, primal, sincere — hell, human — reaction to the matter presented that I immediately liked the fed. I felt like hugging him. Paul, meanwhile, refilled his shot. “Stoli” had just passed its midlife crisis and was booking a place in line for social security benefits.
Brome straightened, cleared his throat and adjusted his coat. He looked like an actor who caught himself in the middle of the very blooper he’d been coaching himself against for days. He glanced down at the glossy table surface, nodded to Paul without looking at him, and picked up his glass shotgun shell. Holding it steadily afloat he turned to me again, “Mr. Whales…”
“Just call me Luke.”
“Luke,” he agreed. “What the hell is going on?”
So I repeated my account, by the end of which the once — and always remembered that way — warlike “Stoli” was sent on its last journey down the recycling pipe.
We lounged in the now dark room, illuminated only by photons bombarding our faces from the TV screen. I was reminded of the college days again, and the absence of smoke, or at least the smell of smoke, in the room reminded me of Iris for some reason.
We were silent; Paul and I waited for Brome to speak his verdict. I was also pretty thirsty. Brome took his time, or it could have simply seemed that way to me, because aside from being thirsty I was pretty nearly floored. Finally I could wait no longer.
“So?” I asked him. “Do I have a chance for lived happily ever after?”
“Sure,” he replied, looking up at me out of the dark lake of his thoughts. I attempted a triumphant gaze in Paul’s direction, but found him asleep in his armchair. Brome wasn’t done talking, though. “There’s always a chance. I’m not sure how big of a chance you have, though.”
While I gaped, I heard a cackle coming from Paul’s direction. I spread my arms out.
“Seems quiet.”
“It does,” Brome conceded. “But I have a chapter of the story you haven’t heard yet. Dr. Young’s office has been trashed and left empty with some blood splattered on the floor in the back room.”
“Shit,” I said.
Paul sat up and leaned forward. “Maybe he got upset by a nosebleed and stormed out of there, tripping over things.”
“Since we’re talking probabilities, I suppose there’s a chance of that too,” said Brome.
“Why didn’t you tell me this as soon as you came in?”
“Sorry, seven-foot-tall creatures that don’t die when you empty a clip into them seemed a more urgent issue. Besides, I didn’t know what to make of it then.”
“What do you make of it now?”
“There’s some chance that he’s alive, but…”
“If he were dead, why not just kill him and leave him there?”
“Who knows.” Brome shrugged. “They, whoever they are, may want to find something out first. Maybe about what killed one of their own. Or about whoever it was that hired Freud.”
“Or,” he added, sounding maddeningly like Paul, “Maybe they eat corpses.”
“Shit,” I said again. “I have nowhere to go.”
“Someone of your means could make a place to order. Although I don’t know if fleeing is the best choice for you right now,” said Brome. “From what I understand, you still have no idea what’s happening. Maybe your ignorance is evident enough. The fact that Dr. Young has disappeared and you’re still here might indicate their lack of interest. Either way, you might be better off spending some time in public. Here seems a safe place, too. You’re a TV star after all. Act normal, wait, and hope that whoever… or whatever protected you last time will do
it again, if it comes to that. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’ll have to wait too long for some sort of news.”
“Oh great,” I said. “I was afraid I was going to die of waiting.”
He sprang to his feet, ignoring my comment. “Meanwhile, I’m going home.”
“Going home?” Paul and I said at once, and I moved as if to stand up.
“Yes. I have a daughter and a wife waiting for me.”
“What about doc’s disappearance?”
“Police is handling it. FBI is off the case, and I’m on vacation.”
“What about me?”
“What would you have me do? Get you an order of protection from an angel? Got his name, social security number? There’s no way to make this official, Luke, and my personal ability to help is, as you well know, limited. I sent my phone number to your database. You can call me if something happens.”
He turned to go.
“What about the world?”
He looked over his shoulder, cartoons dancing once again across his square face. Behind him, the hallway light flicked on.
“As I know it?” He shrugged. “It was a depressing place three days ago. Now it’s got monsters. I don’t see how—”
“I mean the end of the world. What Dr. Young said.”
“Oh, that. That didn’t make much sense to me either. In fact, ‘aliens are gods’ theory weighs about the same as ‘gods are gods’ on my scale. And the latter is the one I am more comfortable with. My wife is a Lutheran. My daughter has been baptized. I… like Christmas.”
I did get up then. Took quite an effort, but I was determined.
“Well, Merry Christmas, then, Special Agent Brome! I wish it to you in advance, because the forecast is not looking good for me surviving that long. People die, people disappear, aliens… and I still don’t have a single tangible reason why I am in the middle of this mess. But what do you care. Go home, to wife and daughter. Go on vacation. If you see on TV that I committed suicide, believe it. Take it easy.” Having run out of things to say, I raised my hand in mock salute and had to grab the back of the sofa with the other to keep balance.
Project Antichrist Page 17