Dragon Tears (41 page)

But most seemed to be alone, disengaged from those around them. Some were slack-faced and staring vacuously into the crowd. Others were as taut as stretched wire, with unnervingly feverish stares. Perhaps it was the Halloween lighting and the stark shadows, but in either case, whether hollow-eyed or glaring, the petrified ravers on the sidelines
reminded Harry of movie zombies paralyzed in the middle of some murderous task.

“It’s a regular creepshow,” Connie said uneasily, evidently also perceiving a quality of menace in the scene that might not have been so obvious if they had wandered into it before the Pause.

“Welcome to the nineties.”

A number of the zombies on the periphery of the dance floor were holding balloons in an array of bright colors, though not attached to strings or sticks. Here was a red-haired, freckled boy of seventeen or eighteen, who had stretched the neck of a canary-yellow balloon and wrapped it around his index finger to prevent deflation. And here was a young man with a Pancho Villa mustache, firmly pinching the neck of a green balloon between thumb and forefinger, as was a blond girl with empty blue eyes. Those who didn’t use their fingers seemed to employ the type of hinged binder clips that could be bought by the box at stationery stores. A few ravers had the necks of their balloons between their lips, taking hits of nitrous oxide, which they had bought from a vendor who was no doubt working out of a van behind the building. With all the vacant or intense stares and the bright balloons, it was as if a pack of the walking dead had wandered into a children’s birthday party.

Although the scene was made infinitely strange and fascinating by the Pause, it was still drearily familiar to Harry. He was, after all, a homicide detective, and sudden deaths occasionally occurred at raves.

Sometimes they were drug overdoses. No dentist would sedate a patient with a concentration of nitrous oxide higher than eighty percent, but the gas available at raves was often pure, with no oxygen mixed in. Take too many hits of the pure stuff in too short a time, or suck too long on one toke, you might not merely make a giggling spectacle of yourself but induce a stroke that killed you; or, worse, one that was not fatal but caused irreparable brain damage and left you flopping like a fish on the floor, or catatonic.

Harry spotted a loft overhanging the entire width of the back of the warehouse, twenty feet above the main floor, with wooden steps leading to it from both ends.

“Up there,” he told Connie, pointing.

They would be able to see the entire warehouse from that high deck—and quickly spot Ticktock if they heard him enter, no matter which door he used. The two staircases ensured an escape route regardless of the direction from which he came at them.

Moving deeper into the building, they passed two bosomy young women in tight T-shirts on which was printed “Just Say NO,” a rave joke on Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug campaign, which meant these two said
yes
to nitrous oxide, NO, if not to anything else.

They had to step around three girls lying on the floor near the wall, two of them holding half-deflated balloons and Paused in fits of red-faced giggles. The third was unconscious, mouth open, a fully deflated balloon on her chest.

Near the back, not far from the right-hand stairs, an enormous white X was painted on the wall, large enough to be visible from every corner of the warehouse. Two guys in Mickey Mouse sweatshirts—and one of them in a mouse-ear hat—had been frozen in the middle of bustling commerce, taking twenty-dollar bills from customers in return for capsules of Ecstasy or for disco biscuits saturated with the same stuff.

They came to a teenager, no more than fifteen, with guileless eyes and a face as innocent as that of a young nun. She was wearing a black T-shirt with a picture of a shotgun under the words PUMP ACTION. She had Paused in the process of putting a disco biscuit into her mouth.

Connie plucked the cookie from the girl’s stiff fingers and slipped it out from between her parted lips. She threw it to the floor. The cookie didn’t have quite enough momentum to carry it all the way down, halting
inches above the concrete. Connie pushed it the rest of the way with the toe of her shoe and crushed it underfoot. “Stupid kid.”

“This isn’t like you,” Harry said.

“What?”

“Being a stuffy adult.”

“Maybe someone’s got to.”

Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or Ecstasy, an amphetamine with hallucinogenic effects, could radically energize the user and induce euphoria. It could also generate a false sense of profound intimacy with any strangers in whose company the user happened to be when high.

Although other drugs sometimes appeared at raves, NO and Ecstasy were far and away predominant. NO was just nonaddictive giggle juice—wasn’t it?—and Ecstasy could bring you into harmony with your fellow human beings and put you in tune with Mother Nature. Right? That was its rep. The chosen drug of ecologically minded peace advocates, well consumed at rallies to save the planet. Sure, it was dangerous for people with heart conditions, but there was no recorded death from its use in the entire United States. True, scientists had recently discovered that Ecstasy caused pin-size holes in the brain, hundreds or even thousands of them from continued use, but there was no proof that these holes resulted in diminished mental capacity, so what they probably did, see, was let the cosmic rays shine in better and assist enlightenment. Right?

Climbing to the loft, Harry could look down between the steps, which had treads but no risers, and see couples frozen in makeout postures in the shadows under the staircase.

All the sex education in the world, all the graphic pamphlets on condom use, could be swept aside by one tab of Ecstasy if the user experienced an erotic response, as so many did. How could you remain concerned about disease when the stranger you’d just met was such a soulmate, the yin to your yang, radiant and pure to your third eye, so in
tune to your every need and desire?

When he and Connie reached the loft, the light was dimmer than on the main level, but Harry could see couples lying on the floor or sitting together with their backs against the rear wall. They were making out more aggressively than those beneath the stairs, Paused in tongue duels, blouses unbuttoned, jeans unzipped, hands seeking within.

Two or three of the couples, in an Ecstasy rush, might even have lost such complete touch with where they were and with common propriety that they were actually
doing
it in one fashion or another, when the Pause hit.

Harry had no desire to confirm that suspicion. Like the sad circus on the main floor, the scene in the loft was only depressing. It was not in the least erotic to any voyeur with minimum standards, but provoked as many somber thoughts as any Hieronymus Bosch painting of hellacious realms and creatures.

As Harry and Connie moved between the couples toward the loft railing where they could look down on the main floor, he said, “Be careful what you step in.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“Only trying to be a gentleman.”

“Well, that’s unique in this place.”

From the railing, they had a good view of the frozen throng below, partying eternally.

Connie said, “God, I’m cold.”

“Me, too.”

Standing side by side, they put their arms around each other at the waist, ostensibly sharing body heat.

Harry had rarely in his life felt as close to anyone as he felt to her at that moment. Not close in an amorous sense. The stoned and groping couples on the floor behind them were sufficiently anti-romantic to assure against any romantic feelings rising in him just then. The atmosphere wasn’t right for it. What he felt, instead, was the platonic closeness of friend to friend, of partners who had been pushed to their limits and then beyond, who were very
probably going to die together before dawn—and this was the important part—without either of them ever having decided what he really wanted out of life or what it all meant.

She said, “Tell me not all kids these days go to places like this, saturate their brains with chemicals.”

“They don’t. Not all of them. Not even most of them. Most kids are reasonably together.”

“Because I wouldn’t want to think this crowd is typical of ‘our next generation of leaders,’ as they say.”

“It isn’t.”

“If it is,” she said, “then the
post
-millennium cotillion is going to be even nastier than what we’ve been living through these last few years.”

“Ecstasy causes pin-size holes in the brain,” he said.

“I know. Just imagine how much more inept the government would be if the Congress was full of boys and girls who like to ride the X-press.”

“What makes you think it isn’t already?”

She laughed sourly. “That would explain a lot.”

The air was neither cold nor warm, but they were shivering worse than ever.

The warehouse remained deathly still.

“I’m sorry about your condo,” she said.

“What?”

“It burned down, remember?”

“Well.” He shrugged.

“I know how much you loved it.”

“There’s insurance.”

“Still, it was so nice, cozy, everything in its place.”

“Oh? The one time you were there, you said it was ‘the perfect self-constructed prison’ and that I was ‘a shining example to every anal-retentive nutcase fussbudget from Boston to San Diego.’”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Really?”

“Well, you were angry with me.”

“I must have been. About what?”

He said, “That was the day we arrested Norton Lewis, he gave us a little run for our money, and I wouldn’t let you shoot him.”

“That’s right. I
really
wanted to shoot him.”

“Wasn’t necessary.”

She sighed. “I was really up for it.”

“We nailed him anyway.”

“Could’ve gone bad, though. You were lucky. Anyway, the son of a bitch deserved shooting.”

“No argument there,” he said.

“Well, I didn’t mean it—about your condo.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Okay, I did, but I have a different take on it now. It’s a screwed-up world, and we all need to have a way of coping. Yours is better than most. Better than mine, in fact.”

“You know what I think’s happening here? I think maybe this is what the psychologists call ‘bonding.’”

“God, I hope not.”

“I think it is.”

She smiled. “I suspect that already happened weeks or months ago, but we’re just getting around to admitting it.”

They stood in companionable silence for a while.

He wondered how much time had passed since they’d fled from the counting golem on Pacific Coast Highway. He felt as if he had surely been on the run for an hour, but it was difficult to tell real time when you were not living in it.

The longer they were stuck in the Pause, the more inclined Harry was to believe their enemy’s promise that the ordeal would only last one hour. He had a feeling, perhaps at least partly cop instinct rather than entirely wishful thinking, that Ticktock was not as all-powerful as he seemed, that there were limits to even his phenomenal abilities, and that engineering the Pause was so draining, he could not long sustain it.

The growing inner cold that troubled both him and Connie might be a sign that Ticktock was finding it increasingly difficult to exempt them from the enchantment that had stilled the rest of the world. In spite of their tormentor’s attempt to control the altered reality that he had created, perhaps Harry and Connie were gradually being transformed from movable game pieces to permanent fixtures on the game board itself.

He remembered the shock of hearing the gravelly voice speak to him out of his car radio last evening, when he had been speeding between his burning condo in Irvine and Connie’s apartment in Costa Mesa. But until now he had not realized the importance of the words the golem-vagrant had spoken:
Gotta rest now, hero…gotta rest…tired…a little nap.
…More had been said, mostly threats, the raspy voice gradually fading into static, silence. However, Harry suddenly understood that the most important thing about the incident was not the fact that Ticktock could somehow control the ether and speak to him out of a radio, but the revelation that even this being of godlike abilities had limits and needed periodic rest like any ordinary mortal.

When Harry thought about it, he realized that each of Ticktock’s more flamboyant manifestations was always followed by a period of an hour or longer when he didn’t come around to continue his torments.

Gotta rest, hero…tired…a little nap….

He remembered telling Connie, earlier at her apartment, that even a sociopath with enormous paranormal powers was certain to have weaknesses, points of vulnerability. During the intervening hours, as he had seen Ticktock perform a series of tricks each of which was more amazing than the one before it, he had grown more pessimistic about their chances. Now optimism blossomed again.

Gotta rest, hero…tired…a little nap….

He was about to share these hopeful thoughts with Connie when she suddenly stiffened. His arm was still around her waist, so he also felt her shivering abruptly
stop. For an instant he was afraid that she had been too deeply chilled, surrendered to entropy, and become part of the Pause.

Then he saw that she had tilted her head in response to some faint sound that he, in his woolgathering, had not heard.

It came again. A click.

Then a low scrape.

A much louder clatter.

The sounds were all flat, truncated, like those they themselves had made during their long run from the coast highway.

Alarmed, Connie slipped her arm from around Harry’s waist, and he let go of her as well.

Down on the main floor of the warehouse, the golem-vagrant moved through iron shadows and revealing shafts of frozen light, between the zombie spectators and among the petrified dancers. Ticktock had entered through the same door they had used, following their trail.

Connie’s instinct was to step back from the loft railing, so the golem would not look up and see her, but she overcame that reflexive urge and remained motionless. In the fathomless stillness of the Pause, even the whispery friction of shoe sole against floor, or the softest creak of a board, would instantly draw the creature’s unwanted attention.