Those That Wake 02: What We Become (8 page)

Panic was edging up to her brain now, like before. She knew just what that panic led to: the crowd of fascinated students gathering around her toppled body, the visit to the hospital, her breathless parents insisting that she take a break for the rest of the semester. She was not going to let it happen again.

Laura rose and walked quickly from across the green, along the path to the parking lot. She got into her car and locked the doors. An off-to-college gift from her parents, their own three-year-old Prius, it now only gave her the comfort of a locked space . . . and mobility. She nodded.

“Okay,” she said, and started her up.

She drove out of Vassar, garnering a wave from the guard, and headed in no specific direction. Poughkeepsie blew past her, offering little more than its megalithic malls and the standard array of franchise restaurants between them. Its trafficked streets quickly gave way to greener areas, more expensive houses recessed from the street behind expansive lawns. She kept going until fields flanked her car, the highway far in the other direction, other cars passing at minute-long intervals.

She pulled onto the shoulder and got out and walked into the waist-length grass, soft and caressing; far, far out toward a border of trees in the distance. The only sound she heard was wind and a distant hum, maybe the highway or maybe an invention of her own ears. She collapsed, lying flat and staring up at blue.

The wind rustled the grass around her, made clouds slowly swim across her line of sight. Her eyes closed, and for no reason she saw city, tall buildings, shining reflective skyscrapers that made her uneasy.

There was a sound, a rhythmic rustling not from wind but from footsteps. She opened her eyes, focused her concentration. Footsteps for certain, coming nearer, but not exact. Observed from the road, she must have simply seemed to have disappeared in this tall grass when she lay down. Someone was trying to find her. Josh.

She stood abruptly, facing the direction from which she imagined the footsteps to be coming. Strange things were happening to her body: heart racing, yes, but muscles tightening, feet finding strong purchase, fists curling. Her father had never spared a moment to teach her to fight, if he even had any idea himself. Baseball, yes; boxing, definitely no.

The footsteps stopped; the figure spun toward her. But if he was surprised, his face remained resolutely unperturbed. He was most assuredly not Josh, but a surprisingly young—could he be more than fourteen?—thin and tall boy with a complexion that was treating him unkindly. His sharp slacks and expensive brown sweater of rich cashmere made him particularly incongruous out here in the field. But, of course, he was not just out for a walk, was he?

They stared at each other, fifteen feet separating them, standing off like it was a showdown.

“Well,” he finally said in a voice that retained twangs of pre-adolescent petulance, “now what?”

“What do you mean ‘now what’?
You’re
the one following
me.
” She felt a bit like she was scolding an obstreperous child. “And just who the hell are you, anyway?”

He nodded, as if this sort of trouble was inevitable.

“Let’s cut through the play-acting, could we? Could we,
please?
” His gaze was astute and incisive, his cheekbones rode high, and his eyebrows slanted at sharp, devilish angles. His hair was a dusty, noncommittal shade of brown, but styled as though he had a Hollywood blockbuster budget to sink into it. His lips were truculent, though whether that was a physical characteristic or a choice of expression wasn’t clear.

“Listen, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you’d better make with the explaining or . . .” She lost the tail end of that one. Should she call the police, or his mother?

“The Librarian,” the boy said, his eyes showing how tired this all made him. “You don’t expect me to think that you drove out here to lie down in a field, do you?”

“Actually,” she said without missing a beat, “I came here to lure you out.”

The boy faltered at that one, an obvious affront to his superior intelligence. He went so far as to take a step back, his eyes flickering from side to side, suddenly concerned that he was in danger from forces he couldn’t see.

“Now,” Laura pressed, “if you’ll just explain who this Librarian is, I won’t have to give you a spanking.”

“Something is obviously wrong here,” he said magnanimously. “But we’ll have it cleared up in no time.”

She spun around in time to see another figure closing in. He’d been summoned by cell, no doubt, though, unlike Josh, the boy looking for the Librarian was clearly quite good at subvocalizing, since Laura had neither seen nor heard any indication of the order being dispatched. Wouldn’t you know, the approaching figure was Dunphy, the grass parting as he lumbered through it, his expression made far less goofy with cellenses now hiding his eyes. Behind him, down at the road they’d all left behind, was a second car, one that Dunphy must have been charged with driving, given this boy’s age.

Dunphy stopped about five feet from Laura, his eyes focusing from behind those black lenses.

“Dunphy,” the boy said, from behind Laura now.

There was an instant to decide: Run or not? But could she outrun Dunphy, here in an open field? If she managed to, then what? Would she have her answers? Plus, the idea of this kid being some kind of sinister mastermind was a bit too much to swallow.

Dunphy was to her by then, no hint of apology on his features, reaching out a large hand for Laura’s arm. She feinted a kick to his crotch, and when his hands snapped down and his knees came in to protect himself, causing his body to hunch forward, she snapped out a right cross that cracked his nose with such precision that it didn’t even knock his cellenses askew. Pulling backwards and grabbing his nose with both hands, blood spouting out between them, Dunphy opened his front up completely, and Laura actually did kick him in the crotch. He went down into the grass, folding in on himself, moaning.

Laura heard an audible gasp from the boy behind her, a bleat of consternation over the destruction of an infallible plan, though it was certain no one could have been more astonished by this development than Laura herself. Dunphy’s nose had felt like a dry cracker crunching under her knuckles, which now stung fiercely. She killed the sick, nauseous look on her face before she turned back around to face the boy.

“Well,” she said, “now what?”

“
WOULD YOU LIKE SOMETHING? WATER?
” Alan Silven—or Jon Remak—asked, sharp eyes cutting out of the polished face.

Rose shook her head almost imperceptibly, her eyes flickering back to Mal, limp on the couch.

“Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll try to explain,” Silven or Remak said, proceeding to his desk and touching a button on the phone. “No calls, no meetings.”

“Yes, sir,” a woman’s voice responded. He looked back up and smiled. The face itself smiled well, as though it was so practiced that the muscles flowed right into the proper places like liquid. But the smile did not reach into the eyes. The eyes seemed cast of another material, a part of sculpture formed of entirely different marble.

Rose sat, her posture stiff, on the edge of the couch next to Mal.

The man came around to face her and stood before the opposite sofa, but did not sit down. She became smaller beneath his regard.

“What has Mal told you?” he asked.

“Told me?”

“About what he’s doing, what happened to him.”

“I don’t understand.” She desperately did not want to be heard by anyone outside the room, and it made her wince slightly whenever Silven or Remak spoke in a normal voice. “He left his foster parents when he turned eighteen. He’s been supporting himself by picking up bare-knuckle fights for money down at a place in the park. He’s in trouble with some corporation, because he’s not in their system.”

“Not in their system.” The man nodded, again a disassociated smile. “That’s all? How did the two of you meet?”

“I work at a diner near the park. He came in.”

“Did you put these bandages on him?” He indicated the strips of white peeking from beneath Mal’s shirt, running up his neck. “You know what you’re doing.”

Rose nodded. Bandaging was something she knew. She had spent years bandaging up her mother.

The man’s eyes were dissecting her, something behind them coming to a decision.

“I’m not sure exactly why Mal hasn’t gone into more detail, what he doesn’t want you to know.”

“Mal is made out of iron,” she said, her hand unconsciously brushing across his. “You just can’t get inside of him. He won’t let you. It’s like he forgot how. Something made him this way, and I don’t know what it is.” She looked down at Mal, saw him sliding into sleep. If there was one thing she knew the sight of by now, it was Mal sleeping. The sight, the sound, the exact emanation of warmth from his body. Rose looked back up. “Tell me. Please.”

“Mal and I already have a rather . . . complicated relationship. But, Rose, if I do tell you, there’s no going back. The world is going to look different to you for the rest of your life, and you won’t like it.”

“I’m not so crazy about the world right now, anyway,” she said without any humor whatsoever.

“A little more than a year ago,” the man began, “Mal’s brother disappeared.”

“Wait,” Rose’s small voice escalated in surprise. “Mal has a brother?”

The man took this question in, his calculating eyes floating to Mal and back to her.

“Yes. His brother, Tommy, and his brother’s wife, Annie, they aren’t around here anymore. They’ve gone far away from here.”

“He’s never mentioned them. Does he ever speak to them anymore?”

“I know he sends them money when he can. But it’s . . . He doesn’t speak to them. He can’t. They . . . they don’t know who he is.”

Rose blinked three times, as if a tiny insect had flown at her eyes.

“Let me start at the beginning,” the man said, beginning to pace around the couch. “Mal’s brother disappeared. Mal went looking for him but stumbled onto a much larger situation. The last place Tommy was seen was in a building. Mal went into that building and found several impossible things. Among them was a room filled with doors that led to other locations, other buildings, all over the city, all over the world. Are you all right, Rose? Let me get you something to drink. This is just the beginning.”

She nodded minutely, and he went to a mirrored bar behind a wall panel and returned with a bottle of water, which he passed to her and she held numbly, her hand limp on the sofa.

“Mal was taken away. His knowledge of the doors made him a liability, and he was put in a prison of sorts. There he met several other people, myself among them. I worked for an organization, a cooperative that used a schema of human interaction called the Global Dynamic to study demographic trends and social currents that were hidden in statistics. We studied them, and, where no one else could, we acted on them. This is how I uncovered the same trail Mal had. And I, like Mal and these other people, was imprisoned for it.

“This was a most unusual prison, in the form of a forest and a mountain. But they had been cut off from the rest of the world by people’s minds. By forgetting that the place existed, by letting go of it, people detached it from the world we know, made it one of the forgotten places. They’re all over, these places, but we don’t see them. They’re behind the world, like old, dirty alleyways that no one walks through anymore. Some of them
are
alleyways, in fact. I know that Mal uses these places to get through the city. Being in that forest tripped something in Mal’s head. He’s trained himself to find these forgotten places, spot them.
Remember
them, I guess you’d say.”

“What about you? Can you see them?”

“No. I’m . . . not like Mal.”

The more she listened, the more Rose came to understand that. The more he spoke, the less his voice seemed to fit the mouth that was issuing it. She felt like she was watching a badly dubbed movie or watching a puppet speak the words of its master. This more than anything else made the story this man was telling disturbingly easy to believe.

“I’ll get to that shortly,” the man continued. “The four of us found a way out of the prison, and we attempted to find out what was happening to us. When we did, though, we learned that we had all been erased, forgotten like the prison we had escaped from. No one remembered any of us, not the people we worked with, not our friends, not even those closest to us, like our families. Essentially, we no longer existed. I imagine that’s what Mal meant when he said he wasn’t in this corporation’s ‘system.’ At any rate, I knew of a person, a sort of living database, called the Librarian. This person sent us in the right direction, which turned out to be the building with the doors, the building Mal had started in.”

The man turned away then and went to the window. His body remained stiff, at attention, as he looked out at the city through the tinted glass, the forest of gleaming spires surrounding them. The movement also seemed unnatural to Rose, like a body being controlled by remote. She looked down at Mal’s quiet, bruised face. She would have touched it, as she did sometimes when he slept, if the man had not been there.

“This next part is difficult,” he said from the window. “The building was not a building, really. It was part of our enemy, part of the being that had done all this to us and was, in fact, exerting control over most of the people in the city, if not the country and the world.”

“Corporations do that every day,” Rose said, unintentionally dismissive of it. “Mal talks about it sometimes. When he talks.”

“Yes, that’s true. The corporations were doing this thing’s work. They were, in some sense, just a part of it. The thing was in people’s minds, riding them, controlling the way they saw and thought and felt. That’s how we were erased.”

“What are you talking about?” Even frustrated, Rose’s voice hardly went above a whisper. “What was this thing?”

“It was an idea, Rose.” The man turned back from the window and put his sharp eyes into her. “An idea that had evolved into a living thing because it had grown so powerful in people’s minds. The idea of hopelessness. It grew and it thrived, and it was going to eat us all alive, everyone that ever lived, so that there wouldn’t be people anymore, just machines made of flesh that carried this thing around in their skulls.”