The Apocalypse Club (22 page)

Sending me after Max didn’t make any sense – but then, most of the work I did for Firmamental didn’t make any sense, so this wasn’t really any different.

I started with the one piece of information I did have, which was Max’s last known address. It was a room in an outpatient transitional care centre. Many of the patients were former GDI operatives undergoing rehab or counselling. Although the facility housed up to 200, the administrator who met me at the door bragged that no more than 10% of the rooms were ever occupied at any one time.

“Why is that?” I asked as we made our way toward Max’s former billet.

“GDI ops don’t get injured,” she said flatly. “And when they do, they don’t get all worked up about it.”

She was obviously a former GDI operative herself, given her stiff bearing and the wide-shouldered robotic strides she was taking, as if walking was just one more skill to master and excel at. Her distaste for me was palpable, but she had obviously been instructed to assist me in every way possible and so was tolerating my presence with rigorous efficiency.

“Excuse me,” I said, having to periodically jog to keep up. “Did you say they don’t get injured?”

She nodded, as with all things, sharply. “That’s correct.”

GDI casualty figures were not part of the public record, so there was no way to know how many of them were killed or injured in a year, but a total of
none
sounded low. I laughed. “That sounds kind of like Ahmadinejad saying there are no gays in Iran.”

She stopped walking so suddenly that I bumped into her from behind. It was like walking into a mailbox.

“What do you know about Iran?” she asked in a tone that sounded unmistakably interrogatory.

“Uh…” I stammered. “I’d hazard a guess that there are probably more than zero gay people living there despite what their former president said.”

“Are you suggesting that this facility is in some way affiliated with a rogue Islamic state?”

Had I suggested such a thing? I was pretty sure I had not. “No. Just drawing a parallel.”

She crossed her arms. “Please explain.”

Shit, I thought. How did I end up getting myself into these situations? I truly do need to learn to keep my big fucking mouth shut sometimes. Particularly when dealing with trained killers who have no sense of humour. I thought about just apologizing and suggesting that we continue, but she was waiting for an answer and clearly wasn’t going to move or let me past until I had provided some approximation of one.

“Well…” I said, not really sure where to go with this. “He, uh, said they don’t have any gays when, quite clearly, you know, according to biological demographics, they most certainly do. You said GDI ops don’t get injured and yet here we are, standing in a 200-room facility for GDI ops who get injured.”

“And so as administrator of this facility, I am no different than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

Er, yeah, I guess. “No.”

She scrutinized me for a moment. “Mister Simms, I will answer any direct questions you may have, but if you could refrain from further unrelated comment, we may be able to conclude this matter in short order.”

Whatever you say, Mahmoud
. “That’s fine.”

She spun around and continued her march down the hall. We made several turns before stopping in front of a black door. I half-expected to see yellow police tape blocking the entrance or at least a “Do Not Enter” sign, but there was nothing beyond the number: A7124. She swiped her security badge through the reader and the door clicked open.

“Nothing has been disturbed since Sergeant Hernandez left,” she said. “I must ask you to not disturb anything.”

I peeked inside the room. At first glance, it appeared almost identical to my dorm room from university, albeit slightly larger. There was a bed, a desk, a tiny closet, a door that likely led to the washroom, and a window just large enough to allow a marmot to pass through, assuming it opened (and there was nothing to indicate that it did). It didn’t look like it had ever been occupied. The bed was neatly made, the closet was empty and there was nothing on the desk.

“Are you sure this is the room?” I asked.

She nodded.

There appeared little chance of me disturbing anything because there was nothing to disturb. “How do you know that no one else has been in here since he left?”

“My card is the only one that can open the door,” she said.

I stepped slowly inside. In truth, I wasn’t entirely confident that she wasn’t just going to let the door swing closed behind me and leave me trapped in there for a few days, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I had come all the way out here for this, so I might as well do it.

Part of me had been expecting some sort of crime scene. I was expecting tipped-over chairs, smashed mirrors and a dried pool of blood on the floor. If any of that had happened, however, somebody had done a masterful job of cleaning it up. The room didn’t look like anyone had been living in it for a long time. Possibly ever. There wasn’t even any dust.

The more I looked around, the more I became convinced she was pulling my leg. I had pissed her off and now she was getting her revenge by bringing me to an empty room that Max had, in all probability, never set foot in.

“How long was he here?” I asked, getting down on my knees and peering under the small single bed for no other reason than because it was something to do.

“Sergeant Hernandez was here for three years, two months and eighteen days,” she said. I was surprised she didn’t have it down to the minutes and seconds.

“And what kind of injury did he have?” I asked, getting back up. Underneath the bed was as spotless as everything else.

“I’m afraid that’s classified.”

I frowned. “Classified?”

“That’s correct.”

What kind of injury could be classified? “Is it something that might make it easier for me to track him down? Did he lose an arm or a leg or something? Am I pulling a Kimble here?”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t understand that.”

“Never mind.”

I wandered over and looked through the tiny window, which provided an occluded view of the parking lot. I was right. There didn’t appear to be any way to open it. The glass was three panes thick and probably impervious to everything short of a direct hit by a Saturn V rocket. No way he smashed it out and scurried down the wall on a rope made of bed sheets.

“Why did he stay so long?” I asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I don’t understand the question.”

“I mean, he had a job,” I said. “He was working for the security division. He could’ve easily afforded his own place. Why did he stay here?”

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “But I don’t understand the question.”

“Shocker,” I muttered.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” I pushed open the small door next to the closet. Inside was a steel toilet and sink. No mirror. No vanity. There was no toothbrush or shaving kit arranged on the sink. Like the rest of the room, there was nothing to indicate that anyone had ever lived there. “We were in the JD together.”

“Yes, I know.”

I turned around. “You do?”

She nodded. “I looked up your record.”

“You did?”

She smiled thinly. “How are the testicles? Regained full function?”

I smiled. “Yes. Kind of you to ask. Not many do.”

“I’m sure.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.”

I cleared my throat to break the moment and looked up at the ceiling. Blank whiteness. How long had I been in here? A minute? Two? It was a wasted trip, but I wasn’t about to leave just yet. I could, at least, annoy the administrator a bit more by making her stand there in the doorway a little longer.

I wandered over and sat down at the small desk. I ran my hand over the top. No dust.

There was, however, something else.

The surface of the desk was smooth wood except for something I caught with the tip of my third finger as I swept my hand across. A tiny, unexpected edge. I looked closer and saw that something had been carved into the top right corner of the desk near the wall. It was something so small that I would be essentially invisible unless you were looking right at it, which was what I was doing right now.

Four letters:

LHSS

The administrator was saying something but I didn’t hear a word of it. My mind had suddenly locked on to something very old and far away.

“Holy shit,” I gasped under my breath. “I think I might know where he is.”

F
or three summers, when I was between 11 and 13, my parents rented a cottage on Nimegan Lake for a week.

Although not technically in the middle of nowhere, it was certainly within nowhere’s municipal boundaries. We went there because the cottage belonged to a family friend of some guy my father used to work with and so we got some sort of a discount on the place. It was small and smelled like a chicken coop full of dying racoons. There was no air conditioning and the water smelled like sulphur. The wooden floors weren’t sanded, which meant you had to put on shoes to walk around if you didn’t want feet full of maple splinters. There was a fire pit in the backyard that looked like it had been used for pagan sacrifices as recently as the previous week. The sole sources of entertainment were a deck of cards featuring vintage Playboy centrefolds (cruelly confiscated by my mother immediately upon its discovery by my puzzled sister) and an old crokinole board with only one white and two brown checkers.

The lake itself was about the size of a high school track field, full of green algae blooms, prickly-looking varieties of sub-aquatic topiary, and slimy black catfish that would congregate at the end of the dock and suck blindly and ghoulishly at whatever crumbs of food were thrown their way like gummy piranha. Mosquitoes descended like Stukas every evening around six and immediately located any square millimetre of skin not doused with carcinogenic levels of diethyl-meta-toluamide. This forced everyone inside, where, after giving up on the idea of a family sing-along or guessing game, we would retire to our rooms to read whatever literature we had brought with us from the flickering lights of our low-wattage lamps (and wonder where our mother had hidden the cards).

The nearest town was an hour away on a winding country road, upon which my father had gotten lost in the same place three times. I actually enjoyed this, as the intensity and volume of his cursing increased with each occurrence (“Oh bugger.” / “Goddam monkeyshitbats! That’s the same cornfield road as last time!” / “FUCK THE POPE! WHO SIGNPOSTED THIS SODOMIZING APPALACHIAN HICK HIGHWAY?”). My father was probably the most astonishingly creative purveyor of expletives I have ever met. It almost makes me wish I was in the car when it had crashed through the roof of that Denny’s, just so I could have heard his last words. I’m sure they would have been memorable.

There were about a dozen or so cottages that ringed the lake, most of them owned by absentee landlords who showed up for a week at most and rented them out for the other three weeks during the “high” season – when the place wasn’t an insect preserve or frozen wasteland. A public access trail was supposed to wind all the way around the lakeshore, but some of the cottage owners had built their fences right down to the water line, blocking it off. The water level had dropped so precipitously since some of the fences had been built that there was an easy way around, but that didn’t stop some of the more Live-Free-Or-Die types from emerging from their rotting domiciles to shake their fists and yell at perceived trespassers.

The second year we went on this summer exile to purgatory, my sister managed to talk her way into tennis camp for the same week as a means of avoiding the whole thing. That meant there was a free seat in the car, so I asked Max if he wanted to come along. Max didn’t usually go on such rustic expeditions and so didn’t really know what he was getting himself into.

It didn’t matter. Max was the best prepared of all of us. He managed to sneak in all of his camo and most of his survival gear (including two rather lethal-looking knives and a small CO2-powered pellet gun for what he called our “recces” into the bush), decent snacks, a six-pack of beer and, best of all considering my pruriently light-fingered mother, a half-dozen issues some quality pornographic magazines.

Max’s presence transformed my time in the vacation equivalent of Devil’s Island into one of the best weeks of my life. We went on excursions into the woods surrounding the lake, where we found the wreckage of a small two-seater plane that had crashed into a ridgeline (no bodies, though). We set up the empty beer cans on a fallen maple tree and used them for target practice with the pellet gun. Max was able to put a hole right through the “O” in
Artois
every time from 25 yards with one hand behind his back, while I was lucky not to shoot myself in the foot. We “borrowed” a boat from a cottage we were pretty sure was empty and rowed it to the far side of the lake where, rumour had it, there was a mutant killer pike that had once taken a kid’s hand off, but the only thing we saw was the rusty remains of what looked like an old water heater resting on the bottom. At night, we would sit in my room, look at pictures of naked women, stuff our faces with beef jerky, and talk about our plan for breaking GDI’s global domination.

On our second-last day there, Max planned a recon expedition into the wilderness to test our orienteering and tracking abilities. On the off-chance that we saw a wild boar or similarly edible animal, we would also be bringing his mini-crossbow and the pellet gun, although I thought our chances of bringing down anything larger than a squirrel with either of them was negligible. We would be veering off the trail that encircled the lake and heading into the woods, where the map showed an abandoned nickel mine five miles to the west.

“The mine is perfect!” Max enthused. “It’ll be an excellent opportunity to test the most recent improvements to my night vision gear.”

I thought it would be an excellent opportunity to fall down a black hole and never be seen again, but it was still more interesting than what my parents were planning – a trip to nearby Wohepta Bluffs to see a totem pole carved in honour of a royal visit (but, since it was not finished in time for the Queen, had been replaced by a taxidermied moose shot by a relative of the Third Earl of Colchester) – so I agreed to come along. Max’s night vision gear consisted of a pair of cheap plastic binoculars mounted using a chip clip and a couple of twist ties to the front of his baseball cap. I guess the binoculars gather and focus enough light that you can kind of make things out in low-light situations, but I figured they would be useless in the kind of absolute darkness you would expect to find in a mine shaft. Besides, it wasn’t so much the light as the magnification. Because they make everything far away seem close, you have no idea how close you might actually be to something. The last time Max tried them out in the woods behind the high school, he walked into two trees and stepped in a gopher hole.