'Isn't this fucking wild?' she said. 'I mean all the energies flying around, all the boundaries being broken! How fucking wild is that? I can remember what I was like. I mean, the thought of doing something like this was just… just… I'd have a heart attack!'
Neil gasped in her sudden silence.
'But now! What a fucking trip! I'm 5000 fucking wet!'
Her form detached itself from Neil's shadow. She was standing. 'Anything goes,' the white-and-rose smear said. 'You can see that, can't you, professor? Here, now… any-fucking-thing.'
Thomas began shaking.
'This is silliness, Jess,' Neil said. 'What do you think—'
The black blot swung toward Neil's bound outline. A gunshot, loud enough to crack plaster.
Oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my…
'Neil?' Thomas heard himself croak.
'Watch this,' Sam said, as though she were a seven-year-old about to do a bicycle trick. Her form moved, spilled like sheeted snow, converged with Neil's darker shadow. 'Watch, professor. There… There it goes… that feels good. Can you see it, professor? Imagine Nora… Imagine?
'Please,' Thomas said.
'Fucking wild,' she mumbled. 'Oh, God,'—surprised laugh—'I'm gonna come already. Watch me, professor. Watch me, unnngh…'
The running blood had become acid. His eyes screamed, yet he couldn't tear them away from the slurry of light and dark jerking before him. Sam cried out, a primal voice for primal ears, then everything became still, save for the fluttering of anguished eyelids.
'Intense,' she gasped. 'Fuck me. Did you see that? Bammo, and he's still so fucking hard. No wonder Nora couldn't get enough!' For an instant, he thought he glimpsed her looking up, searching the ceiling with her eyes. 'Oh, yeah… I think I got another one. How many times did your wife say she usually came? Three? Four? What do you say, professor? Wanna watch me toss another load?'
'No.'
Laughter. 'But of course you do! I can see your boner from here. You guys are made for this stuff. Sex and violence. Juice and penetration. Horror versus fantasy, and fantasy wins! Christ, even Gerard's got a fucking hard on…'
Another gunshot.
More blood he couldn't wipe away, pooling in the spoons about his eyes. Little more than a thicket of overgrown color, Sam and Neil began rocking again. The chair creaked. 'Just so fucking wild,' he heard her murmur. 'So hot! No fucking wonder so many men are rapists…' Though he couldn't see her, she became Cynthia Powski sucking on her bottom lip. 'But it's not the same, is it? I mean, if I were a guy and you were chicks, it would be more, wouldn't it? The buzz would be bigger…'
An oval appeared like light from beneath ice, and he knew she was watching him, her eyes vacant, lethargic. 'Maybe,' she said without a whisper of self-consciousness, 'when I start with the knives…'
Shadows behind a widow's veil. Breaths, a male and female counterpoint, wheezing between the creak of floorboards.
'Even so,' she gasped, 'it's unfuckingbelievable…' Her voice was doped with pleasure, her words bunched like flannel between compulsive breaths. 'I mean before… I was… well, not a prude… but, you know—like everyone else. Stuff like this… like murder and fucking just freaked me right out. So guilty I couldn't pass a fucking bum without digging through my purse! I just… just wasn't built for this job. And I wanted it. I wanted it so badly. To be a spook. A real world Lara Croft… I wanted to be strong!'
The sound of wood complaining beneath rocking bodies, air puffing through slack lips.
'I remember… it was the strangest thing. After the operation… I woke up… and suddenly I just didn't give a shit. It was like I'd been cringing… cringing my whole life… skulking like a beaten dog, and then… I could really breathe deep, you know? Like… those first days of spring… or that first line of coke. And I realized: people… People were my problem. I went to bed worrying about people… went to work worrying about people—I even worried in the fucking shower! I'd think… Why did I say that? or… Why did bitch-face look at me ' that way? or… What if Tom tells Dick… that I fucked Harry? Cringing. Wringing my hands. Catching my breath. Worry-worry-worry…
'But now… hmm. Now everything is…' Pale lines bucked against crowded shadows, and she cried out. 'What can I say?' she continued, talking as though to catch her own drool. 'Anything goes, professor… Anything.'
There was nothing to see but pain, the bite of blood, his brow crimping to his cheek as though his eyes had become greased marbles. Even so, it was as if a great palm pressed his face back and to the side, his temple to the wall, away from the horror his ears could so plainly see. Sam. Sam.
The creaking stopped. 'Getting close, doc?' she cooed, her voice mother-tender. 'Why is it… you all look… so lovely the moment just before?'
A faint slapping sound, relentless beneath the chorus of three humans breathing.
'There's a way… to get it… you know. Just… tell me… tell me where you stashed the data…'
Her voice had become a quavering thread.
'Just… tell… me…'
Again Thomas was blinking, trying to peer past his obscuring blood.
'Never,' Neil grunted.
Another gunshot. A strange noise escaped from Thomas's chest. A cry? The slapping sound, flabby, wet, continued uninterrupted.
'Are you…' Sam mumbled. 'Are you shooooor,'
'You thought…' Neil replied drunkenly. 'You thought screwing me would do it?' Spoken between swallows of spit.
The slapping stopped. Panting filled the silence. 'Mackenzie,' Sam said, like a sprinter searching for her voice. 'Mackenzie's idea. You risked so much banging the professor's wife… He thought all your tweaking might have left your executive functions especially vulnerable to sexual stimuli… So I thought what the fuck…' She laughed at this, and the slapping sound resumed, the tempo more furious. 'But, mmmm, I had no idea it would be so… delicious.'
Thomas stared blind.
'You've doomed yourself,' Neil croaked. 'You realize. Every Neuropath who's engaged in violent sexual behavior has gone serial. They fall into some kind of obsessive loop. Once they start, they can't seem to get enough.'
'Threshold compensation?' Sam asked.
'Exactly. Once the volume goes up, there's no turning it down.'
'Crank it, I say…'
A wooden pop from the chair. The floorboards resumed creaking beneath the monstrous patterns, white for feminine skin, indigo for cloth and shadow, the whole shot with filaments of refracted light.
'Watch,' Thomas heard Sam say, a concentrated whisper. 'I'm going… to shoot him… Shoot him when he comes… I'm going to ride him… Ride him to the other side…'
Thomas had fallen still. It seemed a light blanket of snow covered him, a soundless accumulation. So clear.
Sam, he thought. Frankie.
His fingers numb behind his back, he began kneading his blazer.
'So it was all a sham,' he said dully. 'All of it.'
'Watch,' Sam moaned. 'Hot steel… What a fucking trip… Here I… Here I… ungh!'
The blood had stopped flowing, had become a tacky rind about his still-burning eyes. And at last Thomas could see, see her arch her back, see the soundless spasms, see her slump forward, drag the barrel of her Glock across Neil's cheek.
'Sweet Christ,' she gasped. Her chest heaved. Hooks and lines of white light gilded her sweaty skin. 'I mean, what is it? The power?' She swung her head back in a long, swaying laugh. 'I mean, you guys are going to die, to bleed, and all I want is to fuck-fuck-fuck!'
'I told you, Jess,' Neil said, his voice out-of-breath thin. 'Once you do this, there's no turn—'
Another gunshot, this time into Gerard's grey face. It buckled like wax about the point of entry, but did not bleed. 'What is it?' Sam cried. 'What makes this so… so…'
Thomas stared at the pasty, languorous horror before him. Skin he loved. Limbs he loved. A body he had worshipped, grinding against the pulse of another man.
'So it was all bullshit
,' he repeated, still cold. 'A way to dupe me into finding Neil for you.'
Control had regained possession. There was only one question now.
'Of course it was,' Sam said, leaning against Neil's chest in post-coital exhaustion. 'What? Were you still hoping that I might love you? That you could reach some small spark of passion within me?' She laughed, glanced down at herself as though making a point about income brackets. 'Are you for real?'
'I was talking about Frankie.'
Her look became appreciative. She used Neil's shirt to wipe her fingers—knuckle to nail, like a dinner napkin. 'Oh, that. Pretty sharp, huh? Had to motivate you somehow, professor. You were fucking dead weight. Had to give you a swift kick—what can I say? I'd like to take credit, but doc's protégé at the plant, Mackenzie, was the prime mover there. The old horn-dog sized you up pretty good, didn't he? Christ, the kid's screams even made my skin crawl.'
It seemed he could see it. A figure in black, lithe, fearless, stealing across the humble plate of a residential backyard. Bart's claws scraping the pressure-treated lumber as he ambled toward the familiar smell, then looked up, tongue lolling, into the soundless muzzle-flash. And there she stood, a trick of the eyes, a creature from beneath the floorboards, gazing at the father asleep on the deck, laughing at the pathetic sense of gallantry she knew he must have felt standing guard over his children, over his son. Just another know-nothing huddled in the low circle of his possessions, things prized for an hour before fading into the fog of background shame. Just another father filled with bluster, blind to the tracks that others had cut through his home.
It seemed he could see her, Sam, kneeling before the orange glow of the kids' tent.
'Mackenzie tweaked Frankie?' Neil asked sharply.
The first shot passed clean through her neck, giving her time to turn around and stare at Thomas in round-eyed amazement—at Mia's revolver shaking in his contorted hands. She raised her Glock in a manikin arm. The second shot took her to the left of her nose, throwing her back off of Neil and onto the floor. She landed like luggage. Her nude body convulsed for several heartbeats, then went very still.
Thomas had swung to his side to aim with his hands bound. His right hand tingled, as though he'd driven a golf ball or a nail. Neil stared at him.
Thomas gagged and coughed. He spat blood and snot across the floor. 'Anything,' he croaked, 'does not fucking go.'
The high-pitched chorus of frogs through the screened windows. The counterpoint of crickets under the beaten trim. Two mosquitos danced like dandelion fluff beneath the yellow light.
Mia's handgun clattered against the hardwood.
Slowly, carefully, Thomas pulled himself to his feet. After hopping precariously into the kitchen and sawing himself free with a steak knife, he returned, gathered the guns, then cautiously began freeing Neil. He held Sam's Glock on him the entire time. Neil watched him with an open, expectant face. Neither man said a word. Breathing, it seemed, was eloquence enough.
Once free, Neil stood, rubbed his wrists. Thomas found himself searching his eyes, although for what he did not know. Unnerved by the flat candor of his stare, he glanced down at Sam. Sprawled like a doll. Cold like rubber. Long pins of blood seeped through the grooves in the hardwood flooring, shining like cherry syrup. Her face was beginning to swell.
Could this be her? It seemed impossible. Once again, the look of her had been cut from the knowledge. Once again she had leapt from the envelope of his expectations.
Thomas began shaking so violently that he stumbled into an overstuffed easy chair. His face tightened, as though bound by rubber bands. With each sob, something seemed to snap within him.
'I… I…' he tried to gasp.
'Easy, Goodbook.'
Thomas looked up, uncomprehending.
'Frankie?' he hissed.
'Is mine,' Neil replied.
'And Rip… Rip…'
'The Ripper? She's all yours.'
Thomas could hear them both. 'But Dadeeeee!'
'But-but…' A keening wail escaped him. He blew spit through clenched teeth.
'You're still Frankie's father,' Neil said. 'I know.'
Thomas raised Sam's Glock, aimed at the roaring, looming blur that was his friend.
'Put it down, Goodbook. You need me. You need me because Frankie needs me.'
'N-Nora?' Thomas croaked, jabbing the gun at him. 'She told you?'
Neil seemed utterly unperturbed—terrifyingly so. 'She had the kids tested. But she said she knew all along.'
For some reason, this explanation calmed Thomas. He gazed at his best friend, unable to recognize him, though he could, he was sure, paint photographs of his face. Who was this man, this monster, this friend he knew better than he knew himself?
'My whole life…' He paused, feeling curiously empty. Too much trauma. The breakers had been blown. He felt nothing. 'My whole life's been a lie.'
'Now you're starting to see,' Neil replied.
Desolation as insight. Was that what this was all about? Mortification, not of the body, but of the soul.
'You don't hate me, do you?'
Neil stared without blinking, his eyes button-black in the dingy light. 'No. Never. Not even when I still could.'
'Then all this is about the Argument?'
'Everything is about the Argument, Goodbook. Everything.'
Neil looked biblical in the ensuing silence, angular and statuesque. The man who had transcended the slumber people called consciousness. It seemed impossible that the crimes Thomas had witnessed could be the work of his hand. Impossible and inevitable. Neil had always done this. Moving from rule to sanctity, brushing it all away like so many cobwebs.
'So what happens now?' Thomas asked.
'We save Frankie.'
'But I thought you were past caring. Why should Frankie matter to you?'
'Because he's my son.'
'And that means something to you?'
Neil shot him a curious look. 'Why do you think sex is so pleasurable? It's the way we plug into the future, Goodbook. All that heat. All that juice. You think our genes just magically replicate 2 billion years of information? Sex is survival, man. What you are, who you are, is the product of a million million fuckings. We're fucking machines.'
'What does that have to do with my son?'
Neil shrugged. 'I plugged into Frankie when I impregnated Nora years ago. Frankie's my future, and I'm his past—a billion years of data! My brain's hard-wired to effect his survival'
That phrase, 'impregnated Nora', was like a blow to the gut.
'That's a reason?' Thomas exclaimed.
'You still don't get it, do you? There's no such thing as reasons, Goodbook.'
Thomas felt like spitting. 'Just causes.'
Neil smiled the way he always would when women propositioned him: as though an obvious truth had been confirmed. He walked over to the bureau and reached for Gerard's automatic. Thomas tried to shout, coughed instead. He held out Sam's Glock; it seemed to rattle in his hand.
Neil paused, turned to his old friend.
'You're going to help me save my son,' Thomas said tightly. It sounded like a cry, a plea.
Neil blinked slowly. 'No. I'm going to help you save my son.' He picked up the gun, pressed it beneath his belt.
Since Princeton this had always been Neil's way of avoiding confrontations: pretending they didn't exist. He would stand in the spotlight of others' condemnation and simply act as though he remained backstage. 'People are allergic to conflict,' he used to say. 'I simply dare them to sneeze.'
He played the margins of fear and embarrassment to his own advantage. That was a symptom of psychopathy, wasn't it?
Thomas thought of Cynthia Powski masturbating with broken glass.
What am I doing? I can't trust him. He's not even—
'We have to move,' Neil said abruptly. 'They're probably on top of us already.'
Thomas shook his head. 'No one else knows you're here. I tricked them,' he said, nodding to
the two bodies on the floor. 'I knew I couldn't trust them not to kill you, so I tricked them.'
'You found me?' Neil said.
'Only because you wanted me to.'
'What are you talking about?'
'You marked this place on my poster… Just like you put the web address on my lamp.'
'Poster? You mean that satellite poster of the earth?'
'Yeah. You marked Climax with an x.'
Neil shook his head. 'Wasn't me.'
'Right,' Thomas said skeptically. For a second it seemed they were simply older versions of themselves, griping and disagreeing in the same old way.
'You put that x there. Don't you remember? Back in the dorm, years ago. We had those two chicks lined up—what was it? Sandra and Ginny or Jenny or something—'
'Jenny,' Thomas said.
'You remember? You were going on about the "world being your pussy" or something.'
Thomas looked at him blankly.
'You remember?' Neil repeated.
So. It was all bullshit. Every square inch of his life.
Even his revelations.
For a time, all Thomas could do was sit and point his gun. When Neil vanished into another room, he would just sit and blink, aiming the gun at the chrome and linoleum spaces beyond the door frame, waiting for Neil to return. When he returned, sometimes bearing rucksacks, other times scuffed aluminum cases, Thomas would watch in wonder as the muzzle tracked him, feeling nothing of the threat it represented, even though tissue exploded again and again in his mind's eye.
Neil simply rattled off instructions. Tac Teams, he said, would arrive shortly, whether Jessica—as he insisted on calling Sam—had alerted them or not. Sooner or later they would aim a satellite at her vehicle's GPS coordinates, just to see what she was up to. The two of them had to get the fuck out of Dodge, as he put it, before Dodge put the fuck into them. Just as men had evolved a preference for young women because of their longer reproductive windows, Tac Teams were attracted to indecisive idiots because of their longer response windows. It took time to isolate, to organize…
Apparently Thomas was being an indecisive idiot.
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