“The guy dropped dead, mid-sentence, while he was talking to me. Never seen anything like it.”
“What exactly was he saying?” the Old Man asked.
“He was saying something about others being involved. Then he mentioned a woman’s name.” I scratched my head, trying to remember. “Meruda, I think it was. Yeah, that was it.”
Wetherspoon narrowed his eyes and groaned. I pointed at him.
“You ever heard that name, Neal?”
Wetherspoon quickly shook his head, but he was looking off to his right, toward the windows. The signal of a liar, totally unmistakable. He swallowed slowly, bobbing his head.
“Never,” he said.
I stared at him. I knew he was at least holding something back. But I said nothing; it was not the time yet to confront him. The Old Man swished the amber liquor, then drained it.
“Anyway—Lamalade wasn’t acting alone,” Wetherspoon said. “He told you as much. So it figures someone knew he was a weak link, and they silenced him.”
It made a kind of sense. The Old Man’s face was twisted in a horrific grimace. A thought hit me, and I raised my finger at him.
“If any of this is true, you don’t suppose the Kraken could be behind it all?”
The Old Man scratched at his chin, shaking his head.
“Suzanne Kranklein,” he said. “Well, now. She is the de-facto head of the hospital now. And I’m pretty convinced she’s evil incarnate, based on my years of working around her.”
The Old Man paused, waving his index finger like a lecturer.
“But she’s not behind this. She’s not creative enough to pull all this off,” he said. “She’s a middle manager through and through. Only bureaucratic stuffing in that thick skull of hers.”
I pointed at him.
“So we have no idea who or what this program really is,” I said.
Still clutching his whiskey, Wetherspoon walked around the room. Halfway through the third lap, he stopped next to me and leaned on the countertop, breathing hard. He smelled like mothballs and sweat mingled with the tangy booze.
“You get those papers back. They’ll tell you what you need to know,” the Old Man said. “Then we wait. But in the meantime, don’t say anything to anybody. Your life could depend upon it.”
Silence enveloped the kitchen. We drank in the half-dark.
Wetherspoon left as the sun crested the treetops to the east. After making mutual promises of secrecy—over four more tumblers of whiskey—I walked him out the door, hoisting his drunken old bones back into the station wagon. Even before the door was shut, the vehicle was rolling backward out of the driveway. The Old Man’s wagon—one of the few old gasoline guzzlers still on the road—lurched forward and sped toward the ultrahighway. I shut the door and clicked all three locks.
Sleep was out of the question, I knew. Too many thoughts reeling through my mind, the dawn pressing down upon me. I headed inside, closed the door behind, started the coffeemaker with a spoken command, and drank cup after cup, as I watched the television. My eyes were heavy but stayed stubbornly open.
It all rushed at me in a blur through my insomniac fog. Non-updates about the assassination in Korea, the simmering Pyongyang Summit, a wrap-up of the previous night’s episode of How Low Can You Go. A new snake-eater who had replaced Joe Steelman had edged out the self-immolator in the bracket (the latter turned out to be a one-trick pony), and the clips showed a bunch of the lesser competitors all getting verbally abused by the celebrity judges. An ad for the new Atman flashed by, naked dancers shimmying under a strobe. The ticker along the bottom of the screen mentioned something about a maniac with a bazooka killing dozens in a shopping mall just outside Washington D.C. The glare of the screen reflected off my dull eyes as the coffee sobered me up. I turned it off, returning the room to silence.
The day was underway—but there was no job to go to, and nowhere to go. I thought of the long dragging hours ahead. For some reason, my mind drifted toward the yellow canoe in the river miles to the west, and the wily old trout stubbornly surviving, against all the odds. The Yah-qua-whee. Even with madness breaking around me, a possible conspiracy closing in, I couldn’t tear my mind away from the memory of the peaceful spot along the Messowecan, and the creature surviving in the toxic depths, against the brutal odds. I remembered my nightmare of the suffocating water, the darkness drowning me each night in my half-sleep. The Yah-qua-whee gave me a twisted kind of hope. In the dawn the nightmare had no true power over me.
Instead, the empty hours ahead held their own horrors. Snorting an energy stick, reaching for the Atman, I dialed Lanza, who picked up on the third ring.
“Bro.”
“My man,” I said. “You free to talk?”
“Yeah. Everything alright?”
“I got suspended from the hospital. I haven’t told you. So, no, not really.”
“I heard. I talked to those two big oafs at the front desk when I went to get the results of the Lamalade autopsy yesterday.”
“Autopsy?”
“You were right—the O’Neill-Kane didn’t find anything. The guy’s heart just stopped.”
“I told you,” I said. “You around for a trip down to the river today? I could use it. If you’re not on-call.”
“You’re in luck,” Lanza said. “Since the Lamalade investigation’s been closed, I’ve got the day off.”
“Pick me up in an hour, and we’ll take a ride out. I’ll tell you all about it on the way.”
I showered, and as I was dressing in the bedroom Lanza’s truck pulled into the driveway. The horn honked three times. Mary jolted upright in bed, her eyes raw and bleary. She pulled the Dormus mask off.
“Wha’ happen’?” she asked.
“Dear,” I said, buckling my belt, stooping to kiss her sweaty cheek. “I’m going out with Zo for a little bit.”
Mary’s mouth contorted. Her eyebrows arched, the color drained from her cheeks. She bolted out of bed toward the bathroom, the door shutting behind her. Retching sounds echoed, muffled, from inside. I went to the door and knocked softly.
“Dear?” I said.
A pause—a flush of the toilet.
“Dear?” I said again. “Are you alright?”
“I’ll be fine,” she growled. “Go. Have fun. Tell Zo I said hello.”
I hesitated at the door, listening. But the horn honked outside again. Silence in the bathroom. She was a grown woman, a warrior who had beaten everything that had ever challenged her. I had to believe she knew when she needed help. With a slow movement I grabbed my ballcap off the hook near the door, and went out to Lanza’s truck, which had kept honking every few seconds without pause.
“You trying to wake the whole neighborhood?” I barked as I climbed in.
“Aren’t we grouchy this morning,” Lanza said, lighting a cigarette, backing out the driveway. A sensor on the dashboard beeped, detecting the illegal smoke.
“Yes, a little bit,” I said. “I lost my job, people are dying in droves, and I’ve got a lunatic conspiracy theory that would get me kicked out of a UFO convention.”
“Sounds like a bad week,” Lanza said, whacking my arm affectionately with his huge hand. “Lay it on me, bro.”
As we drove west, I told him about the late-night meeting with Wetherspoon over whiskey, the deaths, and the rumored government program of rampant medical experiments. Lanza drove in silence, smoking. The dashboard sensor beeped on and on.
“So…some kind of experimentation program is going on at Saint Almachius, but I can’t find out any more, because I’m not technically an employee anymore,” I concluded.
Lanza flicked his cigarette butt out onto the ultrahighway. The dashboard sensor beeped once more and finally went silent.
“That’s crazy,” he said. “That’s crazier than the shit I hear from kids overdosed on Fantasia-B who say they can fly and jump off roofs.”
I sighed.
“This is real, Zo. I have documents. And Wetherspoon say
s he remembers how it all started,” I said.
Lanza sighed.
“If you’re telling me this to enlist my help, I can tell you patrols already swing past the hospital every fifteen minutes, and detectives are looking for anybody connected to Lamalade,” he said, lighting another smoke.
“That’s not going to do any good,” I said. “They won’t find any hard evidence.”
I snapped my fingers. There was some evidence, after all. I kept forgetting.
“Except for the labels,” I said.
“Labels?”
“I told you about them. The ones I found in the rooms after the two patients died. They were diagnostic labels with a serial number. They’re connected, somehow.”
“It could be a break,” Lanza said, scratching his chin. “So where are these labels?”
“I gave one of them to your captain,” I said. “The other is in the dossier I took from the hospital.”
“The dossier,” Lanza said, softly, patiently. “So there’s a dossier. With documentation of some batshit conspiracy. This dossier is where?”
I sighed, looked out the window, and flushed with embarrassment. I knew I had to tell him.
“I gave it to the reporter,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“I gave it to goddamned Jim O’Keefe,” I said. “I gave the goddamned dossier to that goddamned reporter so he could translate the goddamned thing.”
Lanza shook his head. Then he pounded the steering wheel with his fist. A pause. And he slammed it again.
“You gave the only evidence to a reporter. The same reporter who already burned you twice. Joe, for being a brilliant doctor, you’re really a goddamned idiot.”
He rubbed his face with agitation.
“And what about the money situation? How the hell will you pay for the kid?” Lanza continued. “Whatever happened to your big plan to get away, to go west? All that’s gone now, bro.”
I pinched my chin, elbow planted on the armrest of the car door. I watched the hologram billboards along the ultrahighway whisk by. We were nearing the exit. We sat in silence, as we had during our rare fights over the years, whether it was on the playground, or in science class, at a teenage house party or a wedding. We were the oldest of friends. We could measure each other’s thoughts, balance each moment on what we would say, like we were having a telepathic chess game. Lanza tossed his cigarette butt out the window and lit another. He turned onto the country road parallel to the Messowecan. But the silence continued, as the car bounced and rattled over the rain-washed ruts in the road. A half mile later, the truck rolled into our nook beneath the spreading willow tree. Without a word, we got out and went to the canoe, prepped the gear, dropped the craft into the river and pushed off from shore. Again I was in the front to power us, and Lanza was in the back to steer—the way it had always been. The silence hung between us—but we continued our ritual, the rhythm of water off the paddles we’d repeated ever since we were kids.
“Let’s head to port,” Lanza said quietly. “That’s where the Yah-qua-whee will be. I’ve got a hunch.”
“Upstream?” I asked. “I don’t remember the last time we headed up there.”
“It’s been a while,” Lanza said. “All the more reason to go. Maybe that thing is up there.”
A few strokes more, and the current pushed us. We paddled hard against the flow. After a few minutes we were fifty yards upstream, at a cove neither of us remembered. The banks were curved and tidy, like they had been carved out by an ice-cream scoop just minutes before. A semicircle of canopy trees lined the edges of the bank. I had no idea how they had survived the Cruzen Fireball. The canoe edged into the still and deep water, and we quietly grabbed our poles. Lanza cast, then I did. The only sound was the whip-whoosh, whip-whoosh of our fly rods. No birds sang, no bugs buzzed, no fish blubbed in the water.
Hours passed. We made cast after cast. The sun hit its apex and started down the other end of its inevitable arc. No sign at all of the Yah-qua-whee. The sweat soaked through my clothes. My Atman was on, but there was no call from Mary. Still, I thought back to her kneeling on our bathroom floor.
So the day dragged for me, as it always did on the river. It wasn’t a bothersome boredom; it was the soothing sense the world was revolving on its axis and you were going along for the ride, no matter how hard you strived for the horizon. It was the same on the canoe as it was in an airplane or two feet on solid ground. I settled back and watched the clouds and the haze of the smog, and the blackened trees bending and creaking in the breeze. The forest was rippled with shadow.
But something caught my eye, out in the immolated forest. I squinted. A green stalk stuck up from the ground—but it had a conical little roof on it. It looked absolutely out of place in midst of the rows of carbonized trunks. I set down my pole, picked up the paddle and pushed us toward the shore.
“What are you doing?” Lanza whispered, his line still out in the water.
I paid him no mind. I stroked toward the shore, then clambered over the side, trudging through the sucking mud. I made it to the burnt woods, and the green protrusion. The carbonized odor nearly knocked me backward, but I trudged on.
It was a pipe four feet high and about a foot around. I ran my fingers across its surface, and it was cold to the touch. I went around to the other side. A yellow sticker was emblazoned with big black writing.
“WATER TRIAL INTAKE VALVE NO. 1644. PROPERTY OF BUREAU OF WELLNESS, U.S. GOVERNMENT. IN INSTANCES OF CONTAMINATION, PLEASE CALL 1-800-731-1644.”
I scratched my chin. The pipe was stained with dried mud, but the label was new, the writing bright and fresh. I reread it twice more, memorizing it, thinking about what it could mean. A Bureau water intake in the middle of the only preserved natural space left in the Garden State? The source of the drinking water for millions of people?
“Joe, you coming back?” Lanza called out. “Or are you going native?”
I repeated the number once more, then stepped away, slowly picking my way around the dead rotting branches and fallen logs. I slopped through the mud on the banks, dislodged the canoe, and stepped in with a splash. The vessel drifted back from land, back out into the cove.
“What were you doing?” Lanza said.
“I saw a pipe out there. Weird-looking thing.”
A pause.
“Was it one of those green Bureau of Wellness pipes? With the warning?” he said.
I turned slowly in my seat.
“Yeah—how did you know?”
Lanza grunted, pushing back into deeper water.
“Those pipes are a matter of security. National Security.”
I stared at him. Lanza stopped paddling. We drifted out, silent, to the darkest and deepest part of the pool. I kept glaring at him, and he couldn’t meet my eyes. He wiped at his brow and shrugged.
“I don’t know really any more than that. The local cops are ordered to keep an eye on some things. Those pipes are one of the biggest priorities. They’re marked on our patrol displays. I don’t know why. Basically, we’re supposed to make sure the Intifada can’t get at them, that teenagers don’t mess with them. That kind of thing.”
“But you have no idea what they are?”
“Above my pay grade, bro. I’m on a need-to-know basis when it comes to anything with the Bureau of Wellness. You know that.”
I turned fully around to face him.
“Same here. At least when I was gainfully employed.”
A whip-whoosh, whip-whoosh-splash sliced the air as Lanza cast into the still water.
“I know this dossier’s lost,” Lanza said, now at full volume. “But what was in it?”
I pivoted back in my seat and picked up my own pole.
“I really don’t know, Zo,” I said, swooshing out the line, sending it back toward a fallen log in a shallow part of the pool. “Papers. I couldn’t read most of them, the print was so old. Army files, most from way before the Purge.”
“How did Wetherspoon ge
t them?”
I watched the fly lay still on the water, sending ripples outward. There was something to Lanza’s voice. Something suspended in my old friend’s tone. I didn’t like it. I selected my words carefully.
“I really don’t know, Zo,” I said. “I’m just the out-of-work sawbones. You’re the crack detective. Why don’t you figure it out?”
I glanced back and saw Lanza scowling.
“You bastard—”
But Lanza’s words died, stopped short by a strange swooping sound above. We craned our necks to the left, upstream. Two shapes flew low in the distance. They looked like big vultures soaring down the river toward us. My heart hammered.
Horror swept over me as they kept getting bigger and bigger. They came fast. Their shapes seemed to change. Finally, I saw they weren’t birds at all—they were airplanes.
Low-flying drones, angular, diving hard and straight at us. Lanza and I could only watch in stupefied horror as the roar increased, the full-winged forms grew, and strange circles dropped out of the bottom of each. The planes soared by, just feet above our heads, and I turned to watch their wings disappear low over the trees to the east.
“Joe, look at that,” Lanza said.
I turned back. The two spherical objects floated down to the water on small parachutes that had deployed. A few seconds more, and they touched down in the current, about a hundred yards upstream. Quietly both of us put down our rods and grabbed our paddles and angled the canoe in that direction.
As we approached, the globes bobbed brightly on the surface. But when we came within twenty yards, the one toward the farther bank sank slowly beneath the surface. And then the closer one reached some kind of tipping point and submerged too.
I looked back at Lanza, who shrugged. We drifted forward a bit, but the current slowed the canoe. We peered deep into the swirling waters of the Messowecan.
Emerging as if from a nightmare, unnatural green plumes suddenly bloomed below the surface. I froze. The neon streaks spread outward like radioactive tentacles. They came right at the canoe, seeming to reach for the hull. I thrust my paddle in the water and hacked frantically at the water to turn us around.
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