Atmosphere (33 page)

They left just after ten, taking the cruiser through the streets at a moderate pace, giving themselves enough time to think about their options, and what they could do when they eventually arrived at Atmosphere.

"We'll have to let the events unfold themselves," Frank muttered, staring at the poster he ripped from the telephone pole advertising the nightclub. "Its all worked out that way so far."

Hector glanced at the sheet in Frank's hand. "If it weren't for the picture, I'd have to chalk up the name of the club to coincidence."

"But it
is
there. So what do you think?"

"I have no fucking idea."

"You know, it ties in to the whole music thing. The club, Sanskrit's essay on binaural beats, the missing kids' interest in music, Village clothing."

"I know, I know. I'm just having trouble swallowing it all."

"Also, there's something else we failed to discuss. Something obvious." He looked over at Hector.

"The girl?"

Frank nodded. "Her murder. It now ties in. She was actually a boy. A young adolescent male. Just like the rest."

Hector said nothing. Frank's all knowing detective personality could tell that his former Captain was now as obsessed with this great mystery just as much as he was. And his weaker rational third—well, it could tell that Hector was also scared. Just like himself.

He led the car down 11th Avenue, parking at the curb in front of a strip of closed shops. A miserable drizzle sheeted from the muddy sky, coating them in a frigid chill. This section of town didn't just sleep at this time of night. It died, and not a soul or even a rat or pigeon seemed to venture into these desolate parts after sundown. There may have been some form of life here, but it stayed shuttered behind the strip of wretched doors. Frank shuddered at the thought of those unfortunates cowering beyond the stained walls of these dark buildings.

"Train yard's that way.

They paced through the pounding
  
night rain across 11th Avenue into the perimeter of the train yard. Frank felt for his gun, hoping to remain anonymous once inside the club, keeping his fingers crossed that there wouldn't be a metal detector, or that he wouldn't frisked.

"Lots of open land here," Hector said, breaking the uncomfortable silence. "Perfect place for the Yanks to build a stadium."

Frank saw something ahead. He put a hand on Hector's arm, commanding him to stand still.

Two obscure forms crossed the yard about a hundred yards ahead. They stepped over at least five sets of tracks, climbing through the connected cabs of those occupied by trains.

Frank and Hector moved forward, picking up the pace, careful not to trip over any rails. Reaching a lone passenger car, they stopped and leaned upon it, eyes glued to the pair of bodies, the cold wetness soaking from the surface of the tempered steel through his jacket. The bodies they eyed shifted in and out of the shadows, over the last set of rails to a loading dock where they climbed four steps to a landing bay door. One of the two people gave the door a few hard raps. The metal grate flew up and a large silhouette appeared. After a short exchange, they were admitted.

"Let's go," Frank said, stepping away from the train.

He only made it a step. The train doors flew open and from within a group of men—ordinary looking men, not bald, not teen-aged, wearing jeans and sweatshirts—jumped down and abruptly grabbed hold of Frank and Hector.

They pointed guns at them.

"Come with us."

Frank and Hector were quickly led into the train. Once inside they saw that the train car was not really part of a train, it held none of the ordinary decor a usual train would house, seats, overhead storage racks, a bathroom. Instead, this lone car acted as a cover to something else, something top secret perhaps.

At least fifteen men were busy at work, seemingly keeping tabs on the going-ons around the train yard. A dozen or so computers sat atop as many desks, each one displaying information to a single occupant. Television monitors had been set up displaying what appeared to be a pinpointed area of the train yard. At the moment the monitors visible to Frank showed nothing but quiet, darkened landscapes, except one which followed three young males pacing zombie-like toward the loading dock.

A man dressed in jeans and polo shirt confronted them.

Frank leaned over to Hector. "FBI," he whispered, eyes glued to the agent.

"Exactly," the man said, his voice deep and gravely. "And you—police. So what do you gentlemen know about this nightclub?"

Hector was about to speak when Frank grabbed his arm, silencing him. "We were invited."

The FBI agent grinned. "I don't think they'd need
you
for anything."

Frank fought back the jab, biting his grin. He was severely angered at this obvious cover-up, but made an effort to keep his emotions at bay.

"Let's keep this simple, gentlemen. Your path ends here."

Frank felt a chill run down his spine, as if someone had loaded a weapon and aimed it at him. Given the circumstances, he didn't doubt the possibility of imminent elimination. "We were invited," he repeated, keeping his inflection as colorless as possible. He moved very slowly and deliberately to his pocket as to not allude that he might be reaching for a weapon, and pulled out the object, displaying it proudly yet cautiously to the FBI agents.

They all cowered at the sight of it, their faces turning a pale shade of gray. The agent at the forefront stepped back, but only an inch, a thick vein in his forehead popping out. "Where did you get that?"

Frank placed it back into his pocket. "The bald man gave it to me." He prayed this made sense to the agents, whom Frank suddenly realized actually possessed knowledge of the entire mystery he and Hector had been attempting to unearth for the past two days.

The agent remained silent, and was about to speak when a slight stir broke out at one of the surveillance monitors. "Mullin—come look at this."

The agent questioning Frank turned around and paced briskly over to the monitor.

"There's hundreds of them."

"Who the hell are they?" Mullin asked, the vein in his forehead growing bigger.

"No clue. They've got torches. They're coming this way."

Mullin raced to the rear of the train car and grabbed an assault rifle from behind a curtain draped across a storage area. "Get everybody together!" he yelled, storming about like a madman. Suddenly the place came alive, and Frank and Hector stood in the midst of it, confused, feeling as if they had suddenly become invisible.

Amidst the fray of emergency preparation someone yelled, "What about the two cops?"

Mullin glanced carelessly towards them, clearly more occupied with the sudden emergence. "They have a unit. Let them go."

Magic words. The door from where they entered flew open and Frank and Hector were bluntly pushed out. They fell down four feet to the rainy-wet ground, hands breaking their fall.

"God damn son-of-a-bitch!" Hector lay on his stomach, head raised slightly. His cheeks had wet dirt on them.

"You all right?" Unhurt, Frank got to his knees and checked on Hector. His ex-captain was mumbling a storm of swear words.

"I
hate
the FBI. God-damned sons-of-bitches think they own the world."

"Keep your voice down. C'mon."

They stood and instinctively jogged from the trailer towards the loading dock, away from the brewing trouble.

"What did they see? He said
hundreds
of them." Hector was wiping his bruised palms on his trench coat.

Frank looked around but did not see anything. He thought he heard a thunderous roar in the distance, and half expected to see a flash of lightning in the rainy sky, but nothing fell into his sights. "You hear that?"

Hector nodded, warily. "Sounds like a crowd."

"Let's not waste any more time."

They walked to the loading dock. To the entrance of Atmosphere.

T
hey had assembled in great numbers. Lester gazed at the hundreds of homeless people standing around him in virtual prayer before the great leader of the troops, Jyro.

"We go in tonight!" Jyro screamed from his makeshift platform constructed of milk crates and hemp. The troops returned the plea with a maniacal, chorused wail.

"We fight until death!"

"Yah!"
The roar deafened Lester.

"We march, and will not return until victory is ours!" He pointed behind towards the train yard.

"Yah!"

Lester waited for the cue and then Jyro, in all his massive black glory, raised his arms up in the air and screamed, "The rebellion has begun!"

The troops marched forward, following their leader.

F
rank and Hector climbed the four rusty grated steps to the platform of the loading dock. Frank's weak, passionless personality wanted so dearly to break out from the bonds holding it back, but his detective third and irrational third had joined forces, assuming control of his very being, creating a new, stronger will within him, a will that desired nothing more than to seek out the answers to this elusive mystery that had left him nearly lifeless, that wanted to destroy anything in his path until he unearthed the very answers he sought.

From here they could hear a remote booming emanating from within the walls of the warehouse: a series of sounds too syncopated to be thunder, too synthetic to be anything created by nature. It was music, the droning beat of hard techno beats and ambient rhythms, spilling out from within the walls of Atmosphere.

Just as the two nondescript figures had done, Frank walked up to the landing bay door with the word Atmosphere messily spray-painted upon it, raised a fist and knocked.

The door immediately slid skyward on its tracks and a man appeared.

Bald, dark sunglasses. But an unfamiliar man, this one possessing a tapestry of tattoos on his arms and a variety of face piercings. "You have an invite?" he asked in a monotone, almost mechanical tone of voice. The lenses of his dark sunglasses seemed to penetrate Frank, all the way to the bone, the look seemingly saying,
what are you doing here, old man?

Frank pawed the object from his pocket.

The bouncer stayed silent. Frank's heart pounded in syncopation with the muddied music. Then, stepping aside, he said, "Follow the arrows."

Frank slipped the object back into his pocket and entered, Hector glued to his back.

They entered an empty dark room, the reek of mold immediately assaulting them. A series of small iridescent green arrows ran across the cement floor and they slowly followed them, one careful step at a time, their faint illumination the only source of light. Frank's timid personality squeezed through a bit, contriving terrifying horrors lurking the dark's bounds: the ghosts of the dead, the suicidal Latino boy, Patrick Racine and the other boy in the alley, their mouths gaping, black blood oozing from the torn holes in their naked bodies, each one crawling from the darkness with mangled arms and twisted legs...

They spotted a door in front of them, a glowing green arrow on it pointing the way. Frank looked at Hector, wanting to say
We don't have to do this, we can turn back now, get the hell out of here and let those FBI boys handle it all.
Hector pushed pass him and groped for the handle.

The door pulled open.

And the building was there.

Surrounded by a link fence, the dome shaped structure sat like a giant insect, six great spines on its back reaching to the night sky, its bulk the size of a small stadium. "Jesus..." was all Frank could manage. Never in his life had he known this structure to be here. When was it constructed? Who built it?

Music seeped from its black shell, pulsing, throbbing, mesmerizing; the ground beneath their feet vibrated, a booming bass. They paced forward across a dissemination of dirt and crumbled cement, through an opening in the link fence towards what appeared to be a door. Frank and Hector both reached their hands out at the same time and touched it, its vibrating surface as smooth and as black as the surface of the object in Frank's pocket. This time Frank grasped the handle on the door.

They entered Atmosphere.

Three more bald men stood in a small foyer, clad in leather and wearing sunglasses. Frank quickly displayed the object. The one in front nodded and stepped aside, permitting them access.

They followed the music down a short hall and through a curtain into a room of great proportion. They stood there rooted, astounded at the amazing sight encompassing them, a great interior whose domed roof ran maybe a hundred feet high, like that of a planetarium, hundreds of lights, a multitude of colors, flashing from the ceiling in a brilliant stroboscopic storm, exploding intermittently amidst one another—all seemingly dominated by the music. Six huge columnar supports stood interspersed throughout the room, towering up to the ceiling like monolithic stalactites in some deep dark cave. Frank imagined them continuing on through the roof and into the air, hence the six towering stacks outside. At the ceiling, a single cobalt ring of neon encircled the top of the columns like halos, a shower of fog raining down the sides in dreamlike cascades. Hundreds of young adults—young
men
—gyrated about the columns on the dance floor, their bodies thrashing in seizure-like motions, in time to the pounding drums and synthesized raptures.