Kings of Infinite Space: A Novel (40 page)

Paul met her eyes and nearly burst into hysterical laughter. But he mastered himself and glanced up the aisle, towards the passage where he and Bob Wier and the procession of pale men
had entered. Callie started convulsively in that direction, but Paul grabbed her arm. “Not that way,” Paul hissed. “It’s too far, and we’ll get lost.” He glanced up the other aisle, towards the ravenous heap of pale men ripping Bob Wier to shreds. “They’ll know a way to get ahead of us.”

The light in Callie’s eyes nearly flared into panic, but then she looked past him and her eyes focused on the pole ladder at the junction of the aisles. She pulled free of Paul and dashed, crouching, to the ladder. She lifted her head warily over the cube horizon and then started to climb, lifting her knees and placing her feet without looking, her gaze fixed on the pole above her.

“I don’t know where this goes,” Paul hissed, but he had already scrambled after her to the foot of the ladder. Above him Callie’s backside disappeared into the glare of the lights. “Oh boy,” breathed Paul, and he grasped one rung and stepped up onto another and started to climb.

Before he knew it, Paul had risen past the fluorescent fixtures, up into the coils and loops of black wiring. Above him he saw Callie climbing as energetically as a monkey, while below he saw the dusty metal cowls of the lights and, below that, the cubescape laid out like a map, each cubicle fitted with a battered little computer, each desktop covered with neat stacks of paperwork and littered with pens and highlighters and coffee cups. Paul struggled upward, his arms and legs beginning to tremble, and he glanced down the length of the cave and saw the pale men still swarming over the livid scraps of Bob on the floor. Colonel was sitting at one of the folding tables while J.J. bound his arm with a dishtowel; Olivia had propped Stanley Tulendij up into a sitting position and was stroking his large, white forehead with one of her limp, sodden gloves. The pool was still sloshing from side to side; tendrils of steam still wafted from the surface of the water; and in the rippling refractions Paul saw the wreck of the smoker with its legs up like a drowned black dragon.

He looked away, suddenly afraid that his mere gaze would draw other gazes in return. Above him the pole ladder rose into
a perfectly round hole drilled into the ceiling, wide enough for a person, the edge of the hole rimmed already with the stumpy beginnings of dripping stalactites. Callie was already ascending into the hole, and Paul’s heart lifted. We’re almost there, he thought, a few more seconds and we’re out of sight. He pulled harder; above him only the dirty soles of Callie’s feet were visible in the hole.

“Callie!” Paul whispered eagerly. “Wait for me!”

Some trick of the cave, some subterranean acoustical freak, caught his whisper and magnified it, and it echoed round the walls of the cavern like a pinball, bounding off the ceiling, ricocheting off the stalactites, reverberating against the walls. All the faces of the homeless men turned as one, like sea anemones, away from the shredded form that had held their attention, and looked up towards the source of the echo. Colonel and J.J. glanced up angrily through the glare of the fluorescent lights. At the base of the pillar, Olivia Haddock leaped to her feet, letting Stanley Tulendij fall over like a sack of meal.

“There they go!” she shrieked. “Bite them! Kill them! Off with their heads!”

With an awful, yearning groan, the pale men leaped up and swarmed down the cave towards the cubicles and the ladder. Colonel jumped up, shoved J.J. aside, and started after them. Paul looked away and climbed frantically towards the hole. Suddenly, Callie’s face loomed out of the darkness. She reached down and grabbed Paul’s arm and hauled him up into the gloom.

“Nice work, jackass,” she said. “Come on.”

P
AUL TRIED NOT TO LOOK BACK
, and soon they were climbing in near darkness. He glanced down once and saw the distant, dwindling circle of light obscured by wriggling shapes and pale faces looking up at him, so he lifted his gaze to the blackness above and hauled harder. Above him he heard Callie grunting with exertion, and the slap of her feet on the rungs, and the slight
ping
each rung made when she let go of it. Paul felt warm droplets against his face, and he wasn’t sure if they were the condensation of the tunnel or drops of Callie’s sweat.

“You still there?” she asked once, panting, and Paul could only grunt in return. He had no way of telling how much time had passed or how far they’d climbed; for all he knew they could have been climbing for hours or for five minutes. His cerebellum told him, we can’t be that deep, but his lizard brain told him he would be climbing in the dark for the rest of his life. The thought that the ladder might not go anywhere was too much to bear, so he concentrated on his hands and feet.

“I feel a breeze,” said Callie, and a moment later, his arms
and legs shaking with exhaustion, Paul felt it too, first from one direction, then from the other. They were passing side passages in the tunnel, but they both kept climbing. Under his palms and the soles of his feet, Paul thought the ladder vibrated to a more complicated rhythm than that of his and Callie’s ascent, and he thought, too, that he heard sounds from below—the faint ringing of the ladder’s rungs and a steady, bubbling murmur. He didn’t stop to listen.

A moment later the tunnel ended, but the ladder continued. They still climbed in pitch darkness, but the sweating rock walls fell away, and they found themselves climbing through a narrow space that extended into the distance on either side. The reverberation of their efforts—their harsh breathing, the ring of the ladder—made a duller and flatter sound. The air was drier and dustier. Paul felt cobwebs brush his face, and his back scraped against a metal beam and a bristling wad of insulation.

“We’re in a building,” panted Callie. “I think we’re in the wall.”

The soft clang of her feet on the rungs stopped, and Paul stopped when he touched her foot with his trembling, sweaty hand. She caught her breath in the darkness above him. “That better be you,” she said.

“Why are you stopping?” He tightened his hand on her foot.

“We’re at the top.” She fumbled at something in the dark. “There’s a latch, I think.”

Paul looked down; the light at the bottom of the tunnel was a twinkling pinprick now, and the ringing and murmuring he wasn’t certain he’d heard before was perfectly clear now. “For chrissake, just yank it,” he said.

She grunted above him; something rattled violently. “Got it!” she cried, and at the same instant an avalanche of crushed and empty soda cans cascaded down the ladder, rattling off Paul’s head and fingers, and clanging against the ladder. Sticky little droplets of warm soda pattered against his forehead. Paul hunched his shoulders and ducked his head until the cans clattered down the ladder, then he looked up into a dim light to see Callie hoisting herself through a little square hole. He
glanced down one last time to see the fading flash of crumpled aluminum as the cans tumbled into darkness, then he raced up the last few rungs. There was a hollow thud as Callie knocked away the cardboard box over the trapdoor, and Paul put his palms on the cold tile on either side of the trapdoor and levered himself out. Callie reached into the hole and tried to pull the door shut, but there was no handle on the upward side.

Paul sat panting on the floor. They were in the second-floor elevator lobby of TxDoGS. The only light came from a street-lamp in the empty parking lot, through the tall windows of the stairwell. “Oh, God,” Paul said. “We’re at work.”

Callie jumped to her feet. Her clothes were still wet, her shirt still plastered to her skin. Sweat and condensation from the tunnel dripped off her face, and her palms and feet were coated with grime. She lunged suddenly, startling Paul, crossing the lobby to an office chair tilted to one side against the window. One of its wheels was broken, and someone had left it with a note taped to the back that read TRASH. Callie swung it into the air by its arms and jammed its broken undercarriage into the open trapdoor. It was too big to go down, but Callie stamped on the seat with her bare foot until the chair was tightly wedged in the hole.

Paul pushed himself to his feet against the wall, trying to catch his breath. “Callie, let’s just get out of here,” he said, but she continued to stomp on the chair, gritting her teeth and grunting with each blow. Finally he caught her by the arm and dragged her around the corner into the hall.

“Paul!” someone called from the far end, and Paul and Callie stopped short and clutched each other. The hall was full of shadow, and a tall silhouette was running heavily towards them in the dim light from the main lobby. Paul and Callie yelped simultaneously and ran back the other way. They hit the crash bar of the door to the outside landing, but it wouldn’t open, and Callie, howling wordlessly, began to pound on the glass with her fists. Up the hallway behind them the footfalls came closer, so Paul grabbed Callie by the wrist and pulled her away from the door and through the
doorway into cubeland. He whirled her in front of him, then reached back and tugged at the door, which was usually propped open against the wall. It wouldn’t budge, so Paul kicked at the little hinged doorstop, painfully stubbing his bare toes, until it popped up and he was able to slam the door shut. He fumbled over the surface of the door until he found the deadbolt and locked it. Instantly a huge silhouette filled the narrow window down the center of the door, and the door shook violently under a series of blows.

“Paul!” cried a muffled voice, and Paul blundered backwards into Callie.

“C’mon.” She pointed across the dim cubescape. “We can use the exit by Rick’s office.”

Paul let himself be dragged for a few steps, but then he dug his heels into the carpet. “Wait wait wait,” he said, in an urgent whisper. “Listen.”

The hammering on the door had stopped; the figure in the window had gone away.

“Paul, goddammit, let’s
go”
Callie said, but Paul clutched her tightly and said, “Shh!”

It was sometime in the middle of Friday night, possibly even early Saturday morning, and the office was lit only by two or three widely spaced fluorescent fixtures. A little more light leaked through the outside windows from the building’s bright security lights, but for the most part the empty cubescape before them was in twilight, obscured as if by a mist. All around them, filling the midnight silence of the cubicles, Paul and Callie heard a steady creaking and the muffled murmur of voices. Both of them lifted their eyes to the suspended ceiling. The panels seemed to be bulging and shifting the entire length and breadth of the room.

“They’re up there,” breathed Paul. “They’re in the ceiling.”

Simultaneously they broke into a run, down the aisle past Paul’s cube, then right into the main aisle toward the copy machine, booking as hard as they could go for the exit at the other end. Callie ran in long strides, knees up, fists clenched, pumping her arms like a sprinter. Paul hammered after her, each impact
of his bare heels jarring him all the way up his spine. Callie disappeared round the next turn, and Paul raced around the corner and blundered straight into her, nearly bringing them both to the floor. Callie had braced her heels, her hands pressed against the cube walls on either side of the aisle. Ahead of them, just outside the door of Rick’s office, the lower half of a pale man swung from a square gap where a ceiling panel had been shifted aside. His legs wriggled and he slipped lower, dangling by his fingertips, the ceiling creaking painfully above him. Then he dropped silently to the floor, crouching nearly on all fours, his fingertips brushing the carpet. It was Boy G. He lifted his pale moon face to Paul and Callie; his eyes gleamed through the lenses of his glasses. He smiled, baring his serrated teeth.

“Are we not men?” he whispered.

Behind him, over Nolene’s low-sided cube, another ceiling panel was already opening up, and Paul clutched Callie around her waist and heaved her up the aisle back the way they had come. They stopped again when they saw the blur of another pale man dropping out of the ceiling near the door where they had come in. Closer still they saw yet another pale man ooze head first out of a black hole in the ceiling; he curled around the lip of the hole like a fat spider until he dangled by his fingertips and dropped out of sight. Along the far side of the room Paul saw a pair of round, buzz-cut heads bobbing rapidly along the cube horizon, scurrying up the aisle.

“In here,” whispered Callie, and she dragged Paul into the large cubicle called “the library,” because of the tall metal bookcase full of TxDoGS regulations in ring binders just inside the door. It was where Paul had first gotten a good look at Callie, as she slouched against the wide worktable and sorted the mail amid the litter of pens, pencils, staple removers, and scissors. Just inside the door Callie started to heave on the metal bookcase, and Paul helped her pull it over onto its side across the doorway with an almighty clang. Ring binders cascaded to the floor about their feet and flopped open. Callie crouched and started snatching items off the work surface, but Paul stayed on his feet, glancing wildly about them. All around the room now
panels were opening up in the ceiling—some pulled back, some twisted askew, some tumbling out of the hole into the cube beneath—an irregular checkerboard of black squares out of which descended feet, hands, moon faces. Murmuring filled the room like surf as pale men in white shirts and ties dropped onto desktops, chairs, and the tops of filing cabinets, punctuating the darkness with soft thumps and bangs. As the men sank below the cube horizon, Paul could feel each thump in the floor through the bare soles of his feet. He heard desk drawers opening and closing, and scampering in the aisles. The murmuring began to swell up the aisles and over the edges of the cubicle where he was trapped with Callie, a clackety-clack rhythm like a train, over and over again in an awful, whispering chant, “Are we not men? Are we not men? Are we not men?”

A sharp, electric whine startled him, and he looked down to see Callie crouched just under the edge of the work surface, an array of office supplies clustered around her on the carpet—a heap of pencils like pick up sticks, a steel letter opener, an enormous stapler. She was feeding one pencil after another into an electric pencil sharpener, but she did not take her eyes off the ceiling. Paul glanced up at it himself. The panels over the cube were rippling, and Paul heard creaking and the thrum of some metallic strut or support. At an especially loud creak, he ducked under the work surface, squeezing in next to Callie. The pencil sharpener ground away. Neither one of them looked at the other.