Those That Wake 02: What We Become (14 page)

Castillo went down to his hands and knees, began crawling across the ten feet to his prey, his feral gaze never wavering.

Mal felt something crack, was hopeful until he realized it was two of his knuckles splintering apart, separating the scarred skin covering them and sending rivers of blood onto the plastic. Mal growled, switched hands, and pounded down hard, the mallet of his fist landing as though on the end of a pile driver.

Castillo was five feet away, almost close enough to reach out and make a grab, when the plastic buckled at its edges. Both the plastic and the metal were too strong to crack under mere human flesh and bone, but the area joining them revealed itself as the weak link. Mal punched once more, and the panel of plastic fell inward, with Mal toppling in afterward.

Mal came down on his shoulders, rolled to his back, and sat up with a stab inside his chest like someone was working a knife in him. People in the walkway had stopped, fascinated by the drama seen through the clear roof. Now they pulled away in horror as the drama shattered the social agreement by becoming real.

Mal came to his feet and lumbered forward as Castillo appeared in the gap overhead, shuffling his body to lower his feet through first. Mal made it to the end of the walkway and entered the building he had just been climbing, as he heard Castillo drop, curse.

“Where is goddamned security? Somebody go to the nearest security booth and
get them over here!
”

Mal was in a climate-controlled outer hallway. He hobbled, pressed against a wall to carry his weight, hurrying toward the nearest corner. He turned it, and there stood a neat-uniformed guard with a badge that identified him as
TALBY
and a small, black weapon clutched in his hand. The blank face of the guard swiveled toward Mal.

“Christ, where the hell were you guys?” Castillo scolded, running up. The automaton regarded Castillo and then raised the gun . . . at him. “What the fu—”

Castillo threw his body backwards, crashing through a nearby door before the weapon could be fired.

The guard, Talby, whose neurological impulses had been commandeered by Remak, took Mal by the arm and half dragged him ten steps to the next bend. They came to a set of elevators, one door held open and waiting. Talby’s body deposited Mal into it, and the door closed on the dead, implacable face of the security guard that Remak inhabited.

Mal held himself up on the rail, knowing if he let himself down, his body wouldn’t find the power to stand again. The car drove down. The light of the elevator was spearing through his eyes now, like scalpels cutting into the gray twists of his brain. He could feel the pressure of his descent inside him, where his blood was pouring into his punctured lungs, stopping his breath. He was going to suffocate.

The door slid open onto the nearly empty parking lot again. Mal dragged himself out, throwing himself from surface to surface to keep himself up. The door hissed open for him. He limped agonizingly back out toward the alien glow of the river. People’s backs were to him; cars passed by, uninterested. Couldn’t Remak take one of the drivers, get Mal away from here? Or would that cost him his ability to put a chokehold on the building’s security?

Mal made it to the corner, began crossing the street toward a line of expensive apartments and stores.

Through the thudding in his ears, the sound of his own body breaking down, he heard the clatter of running feet, turned.

Castillo and Roarke were charging toward him from half a block away.

He rushed to the other side of the street, tripped on the edge of the sidewalk, then collapsed to the ground, snapping another rib as he went down. Blood spilled from his mouth like vomit. Every molecule of air he drew in was a shuddering effort through his body. He scanned the buildings over him with dying eyes, squinting against the painful light. Figures, pairs of figures, hurried by, not seeing him for their inward focus, the urgency of their own lives available to them through their cells, their cellenses. A woman accused her son of lying at the top of her lungs as though she were in her own living room. Not seeing Mal and not
wanting
to see him, both. The clattering of feet stopped nearby.

“Unbelievable,” Castillo said to his partner in relieved good humor. “You know, if the Old Man let us carry guns, this would have been over before it started.” When his partner didn’t respond, Castillo pushed nervously on. “And what the hell is happening with security?”

There. Beneath a metal ramp that led to an upscale tobacco shop, Mal saw what he needed. He started crawling away from them.

“Where you going?” Castillo asked as the sharp edge of a heel cracked down on Mal’s spine, separating something, making one of his legs ring with a blessed numbness.

“What are you doing, Mal?” Roarke said, the professional flatness slipping from his voice. “You want to die on the street? Stop fighting and let us take you inside. It’ll go fast, easy. Nothing’s going to stop it at this point.”

Mal pulled himself toward his goal, his cracked, bleeding fingers scraping along the concrete of the sidewalk.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Roarke said.

“Kid’s a fighter,” Castillo had to allow.

Mal pulled himself into the opening beneath the ramp, just enough to remove him from their view for an instant.

“Whoa, okay,” Castillo said, hurrying over.

Mal’s fingers found the rusty edges of the forgotten grating, pulled it open, dropped himself into the dark hole.

“What the fuck?”
Castillo nearly screamed it out of shock. “Where is he? There’s nowhere to go in here.”

Roarke’s response was lost as the sound of their voices stretched out and warped, blended with the faraway sounds of the remembered world.

Beat you,
Mal thought as he tumbled down.
I beat you
.

He fell into a pool of muck, its brown hue scoured pale. The pool of muck had formed because, while people had forgotten this place, the rain had not, seeping in through the grate and creating puddles that never evaporated.

The darkness in here, like the color of the muck, had paled, the shadows lightening to such a degree that even with his failing eyesight, Mal could see the subway tracks that extended indefinitely both to the north and the south.

The muck felt only cool, its moisture, its wetness having retreated into a mere suggestion, a tingle. Blood soaked into his sweatshirt—pouring from his nose, bubbling from his mouth—and swirled into the faded liquid, stirring it with intense color briefly, before that color, too, was swept apart and faded away.

He bit into his tongue with the jags of his cracked tooth to focus himself, but he couldn’t even feel that tiny pain anymore. His life was pain, the world was pain, and it was receding.

Roarke had been right. Nothing could stop this now. But just because he was going to die, didn’t mean he was going to stop fighting.

He came up to his knees, swayed, felt things inside himself giving way. He clutched the metal of the track to keep himself steady.

Dying in a forgotten tunnel, Mal pulled himself through the faded shadows.

LAURA ROOTED UNDER THE BED
, plumbing the shadows for her cell. Once retrieved, she brought it to the desk and began unfolding the screen to full size. Aaron surveyed the operation like a scientist observing a rat move through its maze.

“Okay,” she said, turning to invite him, but he was already coming forward, and when she turned back to the screen, she saw that it was already filling with gigabytes of tightly packed data.

“There,” he said, once the screen was filled. “This is every piece of information I’ve collected over the last two years that has possible ties to the Librarian.” He had the expectant expression of a little boy awaiting a cookie.

Laura bent and put her face closer to the screen. The first thing her eyes fell upon was a paragraph about the uncovering of a small cement room underneath a government office building in Sacramento, California. Maintenance workers had come upon it after a water main break that caused a flood in the building’s basement. The cement room was not on any blueprints of the building, but when the metal door was pried open, it turned out to be filled with hard copies of bills about to be passed, about to be vetoed, about to be voted on, even drafts of bills by legislators who had not even submitted them yet, every one of them related to corporate finance, land purchases, tax shelters, and subsidies. The commercial future of the state of California, collected into one damp little cement cube.

The paragraph following concerned an airplane bound from Chicago to Texas that had to set down for an emergency landing in Nebraska due to engine trouble. According to standard airline procedure, every passenger was checked off against the passenger manifesto as they deplaned and again as they were received by airline personnel. A single passenger, listed as Charles Alan Beaumont, never departed the plane, nor had any sign of him turned up on the plane, nor did security cameras pick him up in the area of the plane, nor did security cameras in Chicago, in fact, pick him up entering the plane. All of this despite a full flight with no irregularities noted among the gate crew. Someone had manufactured a passenger and booked him on the flight, though he did not exist to claim his seat, which was taken by a mother and her two children visiting cousins in Texas.

Paragraph after paragraph of this stuff unfolded before Laura as she scrolled down: bookstore employees opening up in the morning to find their entire American History section vanished without a trace; an entire building’s worth of law-enforcement computers in Delaware spontaneously devoting themselves to a search for a missing shipment of surveillance equipment in Idaho; the twenty-two-person team of corporate lawyers defending their clients from a multibillion-dollar civil suit all resigning their positions without warning or explanation, leaving the company that employed them ruined by the payout it ultimately had to face. It went on and on, stories, graphs, flow charts, from one end of the country to the other, occasionally veering out into Canada, Mexico, Western Europe, Asia. Long before the progress bar showed that Laura had reached the one-quarter mark, she straightened up and faced this bizarre boy.

“What do you expect me to do with all this?” she asked him.

“You’re the one who knows the Librarian. He’s in there somewhere,” Aaron gestured with a sharp cut of his hand at the screen. “Find him.”

“You’ve—” She turned back to the impossible tangle of information and then back to him, nearly sputtering. “You’ve got to be kidding. I told you I don’t remember anything about this. Not really. How am I supposed to pull that mess of stuff apart?”

His eyes smoldered at her.

“You’re just supposed to,” he said quietly but with a hard chord in his tone that spoke to Laura more of desperation than anger. He had finally found what he was looking for after all this time, and he needed to unburden himself, to give the backbreaking responsibility over to someone else, just for a moment, just for a breath.

“All right,” she said. “All right. Well . . . I’ve never been to most of the places in there. Lose all the stuff that didn’t happen in or around New York State.”

“An hour ago, you didn’t remember being in New York City,” he said bitterly. “And you just got through telling me that you don’t really remember anything we’re talking about. You might have met the Librarian in Australia for all you know.”

“Listen, you said you wanted my help. This is me helping. We narrow it down; at least that’s a place to start. What have you got to lose?”

He turned away from her, walked over, and sat on the bed.

“Well?” she said.

“It’s done,” he snapped, like a child told to do his chores one too many times.

She turned back to the screen, and the size of the document had decreased drastically. She scrolled down and found somewhere between fifteen and twenty items.

“Okay, put these in order of distance from Vassar, nearest to farthest, and we’ll work from there.”

“Now?”

“Right.”

“The two of us are going to get into the car and go from one place to the next? Together?”

“Yes.” She felt like a babysitter again, having to reassure her charge for the tenth time that he would get to watch HD after he finished his homework. “That’s the whole idea. I assume you won’t have any trouble getting into the records here, putting me on mental health leave or something that will salvage some of my parents’ money.”

“No, no trouble.”

He watched her start picking through the detritus on her desk and eventually come up with a pen and a notepad.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Leaving my roommate a note. I don’t plan on seeing her for a while.”
Or ever again
.

“On
paper?
What, do you live in the last century? Are you a grandmother?”

Kari,
she wrote,
You’re going to have the room to yourself for a while. Everything’s okay, but I had to head back home. E-mail if you want, and enjoy the extra space!

Writing it made Laura think of the class she was missing right now—Intro to Diagnostic Psychology—and the entire schedule that, in her head, had already become the responsibility of another Laura.

She signed the note and laid it on her roommate’s pillow.

“Okay,” she said, taking in the details of her room a final time and sucking in a gust of its air. “Let’s go.”

Aaron stood up and headed toward the door, but she didn’t follow.

“Wait,” she said. “Sorry. There’s one more thing.”

He rolled his eyes and assumed an impatient posture. She stood, watching him, as he crossed his arms on his chest and began tapping his fingers in a show of annoyance.

“Picking up social cues isn’t really your strong suit, is it?” she said.

“What?” He stood up at attention, like a baseball player who’s afraid the fly ball just flew right over his head and he didn’t notice it. “What do you mean?”

“Could you excuse me, please?” She made it as clear as possible.

“Fine. Be quick about it,” he said, and let himself out of the room.