Bad Glass Part 5

Both of the guards laughed. "I think I'll have to give that one a pa.s.s," the second soldier said. "I'm trying to avoid court-martials here."

"That's a good idea," Taylor said. "I still need you on the door."

"Okay, Taylor, enough of your G.o.dd.a.m.n charm." Still smiling, the first soldier gestured her over to the side of the door. "You know the drill."

Taylor nodded and held out her arms. The soldier lifted a portable metal detector from a loop of cord wrapped around his belt. He ran the wand over her entire body, up her front and back and then down the length of her arms and legs. After the scan, the soldier checked her pockets, giving them nothing but a quick, cursory pat. He waved her toward the building, then turned his attention to me.

The guards handled me with a bit more suspicion. I noticed the second soldier inching his gun forward as his partner looked me over; the soldier's hand came to rest on the gun's b.u.t.t, ready to slip forward into the trigger guard. And the pat down was much more thorough, the soldier's blunt hands running all the way up into my armpits and crotch. He felt the PowerBar in my pocket and made me take it out. He studied it for several seconds-holding it gingerly, as if it might explode-then tossed it over to his partner. I was about to complain, but the soldier cut me short with a curt shake of his head.

"You guys are good to go," the soldier said, stepping up to the building and opening the door. "You know the rules, Taylor. Nothing to make me look bad."

"Don't worry. No anarchy today." Taylor smiled and patted the soldier on the arm. "I'm just catching up with Danny." Then we pa.s.sed into the building.

The lobby was deserted. There was absolutely no furniture here, just one long, muddy carpet runner leading to a bank of elevators on the far side of the room. Lights were glowing overhead, but most of the fixtures had been cracked open and the fluorescent tubes removed. Taylor saw me looking and pointed up toward the roof. "They've got plenty of generators up there. The bulbs, however ... they aren't faring too well."

The elevators were working, but Taylor walked right on by, leading me to the stairwell at the far end of the alcove. The light inside was inconsistent. I glanced up toward the roof and watched the stairwell pulse above me, the light waxing and waning with the strength of the generators. I could hear the electricity pulsing. It was a slow, slow heartbeat.

We climbed up to the third floor.

Taylor opened the door and led the way down a dimly lit corridor. The entire floor seemed deserted. I glanced through a couple of doorways and found row after row of empty cubicles. There was paper scattered across the floor. Upturned lamps on each desk. A couple of abandoned staplers.

All the furniture had been moved away from the walls. It looked as if, abandoned, these office s.p.a.ces had surrendered to some previously unknown force of physics, something that pulled desks, chairs, and cubicle walls toward the center of each giant room. Maybe, in a thousand years, I'd come back and find a dense singularity in the center of each of these s.p.a.ces. Nothing but compressed office furniture collapsed in on itself.

"Here we go." Taylor's voice echoed back down the length of the corridor, jolting me out of my reverie.

I found her in one of the big, empty rooms, squatting in front of a busted window. She was holding up Charlie's USB drive. "Easier than smuggling it in," she said, a sly smile on her face.

I followed her back to the stairwell, then up three more flights of stairs.

The sixth floor was bustling with activity. It had the same layout as three floors down, but the cubicles here were arranged with ruler-straight precision. And they were occupied, full of life. Each desk supported a heavy-duty notebook computer, illuminated from above by a standing desk lamp. A mix of casually dressed civilians and uniformed officers sat hunched over these machines, studying LCD screens and transcribing text from handwritten forms. A din of voices filled the air. It was standard office chatter: rat-a-tat-tat conversation, hushed laughter, m.u.f.fled curses.

The difference between this floor and the one three floors down was disorienting. The architecture was the same, but the feel was radically different. Like it was the same place-the same floor-but separated by a vast period of time.

But which comes first? I wondered. Was the third floor the past or the future? Was it an abandoned, desolate s.p.a.ce waiting for reclamation, waiting to be filled and rejuvenated? Or was it what comes next, what happens when all of these people pack up and leave, abandoning this place for good?

"This is the military command center," Taylor explained, noticing the perplexed look on my face. "You'll find the bigwigs up on the top two floors, plotting and planning, arranging the infrastructure, sending out search parties and data-gathering expeditions." She gestured into one of the rooms. "Down here, you've got the dregs, crunching numbers and cataloging information, trying to make sense of what's going on."

We continued down the main corridor, past several more densely packed rooms. Finally, Taylor turned into a smaller office. There were only four cubicles here, all of them oversized and filled with multiple monitors. At the moment, the room held only a single occupant: a soldier dressed in a natty olive-drab uniform. He glanced up from his computer as soon as he heard us enter, and a wide smile spread across his face.

"Taylor!" the soldier exclaimed. He rose to his feet and greeted her with a warm embrace. I caught the grin on Taylor's lips and felt a moment of intense jealousy; it was an irrational reaction, I knew, but it was something I couldn't control. She was practically beaming. I hadn't known her for long, but still, from all I'd seen, I wanted to be able to elicit that type of reaction in her, the sheer magnitude of that joy.

As soon as he let go, Taylor introduced us. "Danny, this is Dean. He's a photographer. He's trying to doc.u.ment the situation here." The soldier's arm remained draped around Taylor's shoulder, and she reached up to pat his hand as she talked. "Danny's my spy in the military-industrial complex. He helped me get in good with the soldiers."

"You make it sound like treason," Danny said. He held out his hand and I shook it. He was taller than me-about six foot two-and he had a powerful frame. His dark brown hair was sheared close to his skull, letting a glimpse of skin shine through. It made the curve of his head look like a powerful, tightly flexed muscle. He had a strong handshake. "I just help her out now and then. I figure I should do my part ... lend a hand to the little guy."

Danny smiled. He had a perfect smile-a warm, winning smile-and that bugged me to no end. "A photographer, huh," he said, and he gave his head a tiny little shake. "You should be careful out there. The captain sees the press as public enemy number one, and he's already got a couple of newsmen locked away at Fort Lewis ... Frankly, I think he just doesn't know what else to do."

I nodded, remembering the Jeep with the P.P. plates on the outskirts of the city. Maybe I wasn't falling behind. Maybe there weren't any competing photographers in the city. Not anymore, at least. But the threat of prison-not even prison, I realized, but military detainment as some type of enemy combatant-made me feel downright nauseated. No guts, no glory, I told myself, but the feeling refused to go away.

I took a deep breath and watched as Taylor handed Danny Charlie's USB drive. He sat back down at his computer and plugged it in, double clicking an icon as soon as it appeared on the screen. After a couple of seconds, Danny removed the drive and handed it back to Taylor.

"What was that?" I asked. "What did you just do?"

"Charlie's program," Taylor explained. "We load up all of our email, Danny plugs it into the military network, and it launches a burst of encrypted data out into the real world." She smiled at the phrase. "Charlie's got a server on the outside-decrypts all of that information and forwards it on. It also downloads all of our incoming mail, along with the latest news from a bunch of sites." She held up the tiny drive. "It's all in here, ready for us to start surfing at our leisure. We do it every couple of days. We'll get you hooked up next time around."

"And the military doesn't know? Isn't that dangerous?"

"Nah," Danny said, dismissing the concern with a wave of his hand. "Charlie's got it streamlined down to a couple of hundred packets. As long as we aren't sending out high-definition video, it's barely noticeable. Besides, I know guys who surf hard-core p.o.r.n from their military terminals. Next to some of the nasty s.h.i.t I've seen on their screens, this is tulips and b.u.t.terflies."

"He also recharges for us." Taylor pointed to a power strip beneath the soldier's desk. "I'm sure he'd do your camera for you."

I nodded. The thought of throwing my battery charger up through a third-story window didn't exactly fill me with joy-when I was a kid, I never played Little League, and my throwing arm was for s.h.i.t-but it was nice to know I had the option.

"And now that we've got business out of the way ..." Taylor took a step back, leaving me hanging over Danny's shoulder, transforming the two of us into unintentional conspirators. "Why don't you tell Dean about what you're doing here? Catch us up on all of that great government progress."

Danny gave Taylor a scowl, then turned back to his computer. He popped open a window and started scouring through directories, looking for something. "What do you know, Dean? About the phenomenon?"

"I've been following it on some underground message boards, and there's been some stuff that hasn't made it into the mainstream press. Some strange pictures. Some video. Vague, translucent figures, weird physics. Kids in a cell-phone video, bouncing a ball through a-" I paused, trying to think how best to describe it. "-a sticky s.p.a.ce in the air, where the ball just slows down, then speeds up again, finally stopping and hovering in midair. Everybody knows something's going on here-there's no denying the quarantine or the government's refusal to talk-but n.o.body knows exactly what. Some type of terrorist attack, maybe. A chemical leak. A haunting." I smiled at this last suggestion. "Maybe something to do with an ancient Indian burial ground?"

Danny didn't smile. "Yeah, we've got a lot of scientists trying to figure it all out. Here, on this floor, we're just gathering information. We catalog incident reports-from civilians, from our soldiers on patrol-and look for patterns." He lifted a clipboard from the clutter on his desk. It held a photocopied sheet t.i.tled REPORT OF UNEXPLAINED INCIDENT. This particular sheet had been filled out in red ink.

Before he set it back down, I managed to read a few of the neatly typed questions: 13) What were your thoughts before, during, and after the incident? (Please be as specific as possible.) 14) What emotions did the incident evoke? (Fear? Amus.e.m.e.nt? Regret?) 15) Do you feel compelled to seek out similar experiences?

The person who had filled out this particular form had drawn a shaky red line through question 15, as if he or she were trying to strike it from existence-the question or the compulsion it described, I didn't know.

"And what have you found?" I asked.

"A lot of stuff." Danny shrugged. "And nothing." He pointed to a white dry-erase board tacked to the opposite wall. There was a list of six bullet-pointed items sketched out in bold black letters. "We've narrowed the phenomena down to six basic categories. First, you've got your visitors-people and things appearing where they shouldn't be, where they can't be. Celebrities driving through town in BMWs. Dead politicians. We've even got a cl.u.s.ter of random people who swear they saw the Empire State Building rising out of the west end of Riverfront Park, but I'm guessing that one's just complete bulls.h.i.t. On the flip side of that, you've got our second item: disappearances. People and things that should be here but aren't. Things that just ... cease to exist. There's a whole block in the industrial district out east-it used to be warehouses, with streets and trucks and loading docks. It's all gone now. Nothing but flat, bare earth. And you know the mayor, right? You've seen the video?"

"The mayor? That was real?" I didn't bother trying to mask my surprise. "That video made the rounds, but everyone dismissed it as a fake. I've seen page after page of a.n.a.lysis. There are splices! And they found the actress, the woman who goes on stage after the mayor disappears. She says she did it for her friend's video project."

"Nah," Danny said, his face lighting up with a bright smile. "All of that stuff came from us. Misinformation. Brilliant, really! We couldn't stop the video from getting out there-it was broadcast live, after all, on national television-so we flooded the Internet with fake copies. We added splices and artifacts. We even dubbed over some of the crowd noise, to make it sound like bad acting."

Danny opened a new window on his computer screen and launched a video clip. It was the same press conference I'd seen a dozen times before, but in amazingly clean, high-definition video-better than broadcast quality, better than anything I'd ever seen. And there was no distortion, no artifacts, no obvious splicing. It showed the mayor answering questions, getting angry, then disappearing.

In front of cameras. In front of a whole crowd of reporters.

"We put an emergency injunction on everyone in the room, requiring them to stay quiet. The woman who comes on stage-" Danny pointed to the sharply dressed woman as she stepped up to the lectern; he stayed silent as she looked around and shook her head. "She was his press secretary. She's in New York now. We hired an actress to come forward and claim credit for her role."

Danny shut down the video and swiveled back around. "Truth is, the mayor's gone. He disappeared-right that day, right that millisecond-and he hasn't been seen since. And the video gives us nothing. Just-one frame he's there, with that p.i.s.sed-off look on his face, and the next frame ... poof!" He popped open his hand, showing me an empty palm.

I stood dumbstruck for a moment, trying to process this information.

"Yeah," Danny said. "Just blows your f.u.c.king mind."

I glanced over at Taylor, thinking she'd break down laughing at any moment, revealing this whole thing as a big fat joke, but her face remained perfectly still.

"Anyway, after visitors and disappearances, we've got sounds without sources." Danny pointed back to the whiteboard. "Voices emanating from empty rooms. Displaced screams and crying. h.e.l.l, for two days an invisible gun battle raged outside the convention center; a lot of people heard that one." Danny shivered, and his voice dropped. "You could call them auditory ghosts, I guess. They usually come at night. We've got people who can't sleep for all of the things they hear."

I remembered the soldier at the barricade. I remembered the wistful, nervous look on his face. He'd seemed like a haunted man, talking about his transfer out of the city, about how he no longer heard things.

"Next, we've got creatures. Either animals completely out of place-flamingos in the park, clouds of b.u.t.terflies in the middle of the night-or things that don't exist, things that shouldn't exist." I nodded, remembering the dogs-the wolves-from the night before. Amanda's animals, with those strange, extrajointed limbs. "There's some scary s.h.i.t out there," he said. "We've found bodies. Bodies with tooth marks or clawed nearly in half." Danny shivered again; I wasn't sure if this was a genuine reaction, or just something he did to provide emphasis.

"Our fifth category is a little more difficult." I glanced up at the board and saw the phrase "mental problems." "We're not quite sure if it's a phenomenon in its own right or a result of everything else. It's just ... people going crazy. Acting odd, unusual. Losing memories. Going schizophrenic or catatonic. It might be a result of all this stress, or it might be something else. Another symptom of this ... disease." Danny shook his head and managed a sad little smile. "In my time here I've had two commanding officers fall apart. One was struck dumb by complete amnesia. The other attacked three of his men with a knife ... before turning it on his own genitalia."

I made an involuntary wince.

"And the final category?" I asked.

Danny gestured back toward the whiteboard. "Miscellaneous," he said, offering up a pathetic shrug. "The last of our all-encompa.s.sing groups. Just ... everything else."

I stared at the board for a long time, waiting for a pattern to emerge, waiting for some type of connective thread to surface and tie it all together. But there was no thread. There was no pattern. The categories remained disparate, unconnected things-except for visitors and disappearances, which could have been flip sides of the same coin.

And miscellaneous? It seemed like these people, these experts, were stumbling around in the dark here. They had no idea what was going on, and their categories did nothing to illuminate the situation.

The hotel room-that frightening tableau, now burned into my memory-remained just as strange, just as alien.

I walked over and tapped the board. "In this ... in this miscellaneous category, have you heard anything ... like ..." I groped for words, trying to figure out how to explain the body in the ceiling. "Has anybody seen somebody melted-a human body, just kind of merged with a ceiling or a wall? Limbs and body parts disappearing into solid objects?"

Danny shook his head. "No. Nothing like that. Not that I know of."

"Is that what you saw yesterday?" Taylor asked. I turned and found a concerned look on her face. Not just concerned, but startled, going pale. "You saw a body? In a floor?"

"Well, I ..." I shook my head. Pinned beneath that intense stare, I felt fl.u.s.tered. I felt a blush rising up beneath my collar. "No, not really. I'm just ..." I composed myself a bit. "I'm not sure what I saw." I shook my head, trying to dismiss her concern, trying to escape the sharp look in her eyes. "Just forget it."

They both continued to stare at me, Danny curious and Taylor ... well, there was something strange-something hungry-about Taylor's expression.

"So what have you figured out?" I asked, trying to redirect the conversation. "After one, no, two months on the job, what have your experts deduced?"

Danny shrugged. "Nothing much. The doctors and scientists say there's some type of chemical imbalance in the population here. Neurotransmitters. In the brain. They don't know what's causing it. They've been giving antidepressants to anybody who wants them, to boost serotonin and dopamine levels. It seems to help. Some."

"Help with what?"

"With everything." He nodded toward the list on the board: visitors, disappearances, sounds, creatures, mental, and miscellaneous.

"But it isn't all mental, is it? There's genuine physical phenomenon here." I gestured toward his computer screen, where the mayor's video file-0907-pressconf.mpeg-remained highlighted. "Are you saying that a liberal dose of Prozac would have stopped the mayor from disappearing? That something physical-and impossible-was caused by errant brain chemicals?"

"All we know is that people on the drugs are involved in fewer unexplained incidents. The correlation is there, small but statistically significant. And believe me, that's killing our scientists. It's something they just don't want to hear." Danny double clicked his mouse and restarted the press conference video. "So yeah, maybe if the mayor had been on Prozac, it would have been different. Or maybe it wasn't the mayor. Maybe if everyone else in the room had been on Prozac ..."

Danny trailed off. On his screen, the mayor once again popped out of existence.

"At least it doesn't follow you out," he said, his voice hushed, suddenly sedate. "Once you're outside the perimeter, the neurotransmitter levels even back out. The weirdness stops. Things return to normal."

"It just doesn't make any sense," I said, shaking my head in disbelief.

"Yeah," Danny agreed. "Welcome to Spokane."

"We've got to go," Taylor said. She gestured toward the door with a little sideways motion of her head. "The captain should be back any time now."

Danny got up from his seat and gave Taylor a kiss on the cheek. "Day after tomorrow?" he asked.

Taylor smiled. At his touch, all the gloom and concern dropped away from her face. "It's a date."

"They're trying the hospital again tomorrow morning. They've got grappling hooks this time. Just like Batman." Danny turned and gave me another appraising look. He clasped me by the shoulder and shook my hand, once again flashing that perfect smile. "You might want to check it out, Dean. Probably some good photos in it for you."

I nodded.

Taylor led me back through the building-down the stairwell and across the lobby. She exchanged good-byes with the guards at the door and headed east on Sprague, back into the web of downtown buildings. We both stayed silent for a couple of minutes, walking at a comfortable pace.

Finally, Taylor broke the silence. "Danny's commanding officer-the captain-would s.h.i.t a brick if he knew about our little arrangement. He's got an issue with civilians in the city. Wants to crack down and force us all out. He certainly wouldn't like to see us walking the halls of military headquarters. That said, he's not above breaking rules if it suits him. He's got some type of deal with Mama Ca.s.s-lets her food shipments get through in exchange for a free lunch every day." She raised her wrist.w.a.tch. "Noon to one. Predictable as clockwork."

"Are you and Danny an item?" The question just bubbled out, a flash of fire from deep in my gut. A surprised look appeared on Taylor's face, and I felt an overwhelming need to fill the ensuing silence. "It's none of my business, I'm sure. It's just ... you seemed really happy together. I was just wondering."

Suddenly, a loud gale of laughter wracked Taylor's body, the force bending her nearly double. "For a photographer, you're not very observant," she said, wiping a tear from her eye. "I'm not his type. Really. The way he was looking at you ... I think you're more to his taste."

"What?" Then, after a moment: "Oh."

"Yeah. Oh." Taylor once again started down Sprague. After a couple of steps, she cast a glance back over her shoulder. The laughter was still there, lingering in the corners of her smile. "He's a good guy, a good friend. If you're looking for a date, you could really do a lot worse."

I blushed, feeling stupid, then hurried to catch up.

When we got back to the house, Amanda and Mac were in the kitchen making grilled cheese sandwiches. Amanda was tending to the Coleman stove while Mac leaned in over her shoulder. His arms were wrapped around her waist, and she was laughing, squirming in his grasp as he nuzzled at her neck, rasping his whiskers against her pale flesh. As soon as she saw me enter, a look crossed over her face: a momentary darkness, like a cloud across the sun.

Those animals. Those dogs. Those things. After last night, it was something we shared. A bond.

"Hungry?" she asked, momentarily breaking free from Mac's grip. She gave his hands a playful little slap.

"G.o.d, yes," I groaned. The smell of bread frying in b.u.t.ter and the sharp tang of cheese had already started my mouth watering. I was running on empty. I'd slept through breakfast, and Taylor's soldier friends had stolen my PowerBar.

"And Taylor?" Amanda asked. "How about you?"

Taylor shook her head. "I had a big breakfast," she said, brushing past me and sitting down next to Charlie.

As far as I could tell, Charlie hadn't moved a muscle in our absence. He was still sitting at the kitchen table, still perched in front of his computer. The only thing that had changed was the addition of a half-finished sandwich resting at his elbow. Taylor handed him the USB drive, and he grunted a distracted thanks.

"I was thinking I could show Dean the park," Amanda said. "Maybe later today." She slid a sandwich from the skillet to an empty plate, then walked it over to the table. I took a seat next to Taylor.

As she handed me the plate, Amanda gave me a slight nod, and for a brief moment, her face became pinched, her eyes suddenly imploring. It was a fleeting expression, and when she straightened back up, the look was gone, hidden beneath a smile. "You'd like the park," she continued. "People see things there ... animals, sometimes. You might get some good photographs."

I nodded, getting her message loud and clear. When I glanced back over to the stove, I found Mac watching me with a confused look on his face. He'd seen something between the two of us, no doubt the wrong thing.

I started to say something-I don't remember what: a question for Taylor, maybe, about Danny and the military-but a loud bang shocked me out of my thoughts. I turned and found Charlie standing bolt upright in front of his computer, his chair overturned on the floor. He stood like that for a long moment, a stricken look on his face. Then he slammed his laptop shut and darted out of the room.

He fled the house, leaving the front door standing open behind him.

I glanced over at Taylor, but she just shook her head, her eyes wide.

After a moment of paralyzed silence, Mac started to move. He took several steps toward the front door, going after Charlie, then pulled to an abrupt stop. He took a step forward, then a step back. It was like some halting, tentative dance, a ballet of confusion and adrenaline. Amanda, meanwhile, stayed on her side of the room, fiddling with the dials on the Coleman stove.