Those That Wake (12 page)

"Why don't you just make up a name?" Laura suggested. "Just so we have something to call you."

"I've already got something to call you," Brath mumbled quite loud enough to be heard.

"My name's Mike," he finally said, straight at Brath.

"How did you get here, Mike?" Laura asked him.

"I was delivering some books to the school basement—"

"You're a teacher?" Brath asked him, his disdain for the idea clear.

"Yeah, I'm a teacher. I brought some books down. There was a door there that hadn't been there before. Never been there before, I swear to God." He clearly doubted it himself, even as he was saying it. "This guy found me"—he pointed at Remak—"and we went back to look for the door. It wasn't there anymore, and we couldn't find it. Bunch of students came along, and they beat the living shit out of us. They didn't seem like students, though, exactly. My students, they're loud and rude even when they're not trying to beat you up. These were quiet. Like Remak said, they marched toward us like robots or something."

The remote look of the students sounded uncomfortably familiar to Mal, like that of the kids in front of Tommy's place. But there was more than that.

"What about the door?" Mal said.

"What about it?"

"Did you open it? What did it look like?"

"It was metal, I guess; gray and metal. It had a shiny handle."

Mal nodded. "And when you opened it, you saw a white room with lots of other doors in it."

"And a guy in a suit, who saw me and started to come toward me before I slammed the door in his face."

"How did you know about the room behind the door?" Laura asked Mal.

"It was in a basement?" Mal went on with Mike, who nodded. "There was a boiler room down there, down a short hall?"

"Yeah," Mike said impatiently. Remak's eyes were intent on Mal.

"I saw that door. I think I was in that room," Mal said, having a hard time hiding his uneasiness. "My brother called me, sounded like he was in trouble. I found his girlfriend—" He stopped himself, his hand shot to his back pocket, searching for the photo of Tommy and Annie. It was there, thank God. It gave him some inexplicable measure of relief. At least they hadn't taken that away, hadn't cast this precious thing into doubt.

"Mal," Laura said gently.

"Um, right. His girlfriend told me he worked for this guy sometimes, and she showed me where they met. It was a big building in midtown. Midtown Manhattan, that is."

"Is that where you live?" Remak asked. "And your brother?"

"No, Brooklyn," Mal answered. "But they got me—me and Brath—in Manhattan. Is that where they got all of you?"

Isabel nodded.

"I was in Queens," Remak said.

"Queens," Mike grumbled. "I don't go into Manhattan since they put up that giant dome full of goddamned poison gases."

"Long Island," Laura said. "I live on Long Island. I was at home when..." She waved her hand as Brath had before at the impossibility around them.

"So I went to this building in midtown," Mal went on, "all mirror from bottom to top. Do you know the one?" He told them the cross streets.

"All the buildings up there look alike," Mike said. "Who looks up at them, anyway?"

"Yeah, I'd never really noticed this one myself. Anyhow, I went in." Mal described the place to Remak's obvious fascination, and told how he went up in the elevator to the thirty-second floor. "I opened one door, and it looked like it went into a hospital or something. The other one opened into a basement. There was a hallway, and it was humid in there. I lived in a basement near a boiler once, and it was humid like that."

"Did you close that door?" Remak asked.

"I..." Mal went over it in his head. "I think so. I threw it shut and ran out."

"But it might have bounced from the frame—it could have remained open," Remak said. "You didn't
see
it closed."

"No. I didn't." He tried, but couldn't make it not true.

"You dumb bastard." Mike scowled at him. "It's your fault I'm here. The door disappeared after I shut it. If you'd shut it, I wouldn't even be here. You dumb bastard."

Mal took it, wiping all expression from his face.

"Take it easy, Mike," Laura said.

"Easy? Who the hell are you to tell me that? You're a child. Do you see this place? We're never going to get out of here!"

"We're all scared and upset," Laura said, not fighting, but reasoning, making a plea. "Mal obviously didn't mean to bring you here. I think there's a lot more going on than just that door."

"If that's why you're here," Mal said, "then I'm sorry. I wouldn't have gotten anyone into this"—his eyes cut across to Brath—"if I'd known..." He shook his head.

"You got out of the building, Mal," Remak said, "and you got your friend Brath to come back with you."

"Pretty much." Mal glanced at Isabel, then quickly away from her. "I almost went to the police, but what was I going to tell them?"

"What about your brother's girlfriend?" Laura asked. "What happened to her?"

"She was gone when I came out." Another subject that put a pain in his gut, another life he was responsible for ruining now. "I guess I'm looking for her, too."

"Well done," Mike said.

"Hey," Brath said, pointing at him, "shut it."

"Bite me, you crime-lord wannabe."

"Please!" Laura shouted. "
Please.
Can't we just get through this? Nikolai, Mal came to you?"

"Right." Brath slid his eyes away from Mike. "He brought me back to the building. We met her on the way," he said, pointing a finger like a gun at Isabel. "We went into the place, rang for the elevator. Someone came off it, like I said: really big, really strong. That was it."

"So he kicked your ass?" Mike said.

"What about you, Isabel?" Laura cut in, before anything more could come of Mike's remark.

"I was making deliveries for a guy," Isabel said, then she stuck her chin across the circular group they'd formed, at Brath and Mal. "Batman and the Boy Wonder over here caught up with me. He pulls open the package, and there's nothing in it. So I followed them back and waited outside for a couple of minutes, and when they didn't come out, I went in anyway. My mistake. Guy in the suit was standing there in the sort-of lobby. I saw him, he saw me, now I'm here."

"What package?" Remak asked. "What do you mean there was nothing in it?"

"It was a small padded envelope." Brath intercepted the question. "Like nine by twelve. There was shredded paper in it, that's all."

"Shredded paper? Where were you taking it?"

"A playground," Isabel said. "I was supposed to leave it on a bench in a playground. The packages were always soft and mushy like that, so I knew they weren't, like, bombs or something. Bombs would have set off subway scanners anyway, right?"

"All the packages you delivered were like that one?"

"Same size, same shape, same weight. I never looked in one before."

"Where did you deliver them to?" Remak pressed relentlessly.

"A lot of places." She squinted one eye, compiling a list. "Schools, banks, hospitals, libraries, fast-food places."

"What about the man who gave them to you? Same man every time?"

"Yeah. Wore the same dull suit, kind of plain looking." She thought about it, searched for more detail, but couldn't seem to find any. "Really plain looking."

"Did his voice sound familiar to you?" Mal interjected, remembering the voice he'd heard in the lobby giving direction to another courier. "Did you recognize it at all?"

"I don't know. A little, maybe. He sounded like every adult who ever said they were trying to help me out." She chuckled at that idea, as if her life were filled with promises that had never been kept.

"How did he approach you for these jobs?" Remak pressed on.

"I'm part of a program where they find work for you, sort of tell you what you should be doing."

"It's called parole," Brath sneered.

"Yeah"—she glared at him—"well, as long as we're talking about it, my parole officer keeps throwing jobs at me where they treat me like shit or don't even pay me enough to keep my cat fed. It's, like, designed to push you back into what you were doing before and then, bang, you're back in jail. Well, fuck that. That's not me anymore. I'm not going back to jail, and I'm not letting this brilliant system put me there. I can do better. So I'm going around businesses in my neighborhood, seeing if they need any help, just cleaning up or making deliveries or whatever, and one day, I'm sitting at a McDonald's and this guy in a suit comes up and offers me this delivery job. I took one job. He's not Mr. Personality, but he doesn't treat me like a slave. He won't tell me what's in the packages, but like I said, I can tell they're not bombs or drugs or anything. So I'm working for him for a while when this guy comes along and screws me up again."

Brath held her eyes briefly, then turned away, no apology on his lips or face.

"Whatever," Isabel said to the back of his head.

"And you'd never seen this man in the suit before?" Remak asked. "Can you describe him?"

"He was average height," she said. "He didn't have ... I mean, he looked ... he was just sort of plain looking."

"The color of his eyes?" Remak said. "His hair?"

"Jesus," Mike said. Mal had to admit, there was something about Remak's calm that gave the sense of a scientist looking at them through a microscope. "Are you done getting her life story, for Christ's sake? Do you ever run out of questions?"

"Actually," Laura spoke up, looking at Mike with a chagrined expression, "I was wondering why all of us ended up here but"—she turned to Mal—"your brother's girlfriend didn't, Mal. I mean, she was taken around the same time, right? Why isn't she here with us?"

"I figured," Mal said, dredging up some meager optimism, "that is, I was hoping, maybe, she got away."

"I wouldn't count on it." Remak shook his head, not seeming malicious, just coldly realistic. "And you, Laura? How did you wind up here?"

She looked up a little sourly, as though she'd hoped to be skipped over for that one.

"You're the last," Remak pressed.

"I was home alone. My parents were away for the weekend," she said, her voice suddenly shaky. Mal felt his heart beating in his chest at her hurt. "When I called them ... I don't know how this is going to sound."

"Nothing could be stranger than what's happening to us, Laura," Remak said. "And it could be important."

"I called them," Laura said, nodding, as her voice grew smaller, "and they didn't know who I was." She stopped, either for a reaction or to collect herself. "Had, like, no memory of me at all. I went to confront them, and they still didn't recognize me; didn't even recognize themselves in old home movies."

Mal barely knew what to make of that. He could see how painful it was for Laura, but there were times when he had
wished
his mother would forget him.

"What do your parents do, exactly?" Remak wondered.

"My father works for an architectural firm. My mother doesn't work anymore, but she used to teach graduate art history."

"Go on," Remak encouraged her. He clearly preferred listening to speaking.

"I went to my school, to speak to friends, but they didn't know me there, either. I wasn't even in the school records." She angrily swept a tear from her cheek. Mal tried to put himself in her position. How many people in school even knew his name? Right now, how many cared that he was gone?

"I know all about identity theft," Laura went on, "but what the hell is this? I went back home and two Homeland Security agents were waiting for me. They wanted to arrest me. No, that's not all. They pulled a gun on me. I wasn't doing anything at all. Nothing threatening, that's for sure. The agent pulled a gun, and then they shot me up with something." She rubbed at her arm again. "And I woke up here, just like the rest of you." Her eyes cast about, searching for an explanation. "But why a forest? Why here?"

"The real question is," Brath said, "did anyone mention what was going on to anyone else, anyone who might come looking for us?" Brath's ice-chip eyes were losing interest with this process.

"Just him." Mike put his thumb toward Remak.

"My mother and her husband know my brother is missing," Mal said. "But that's all."

"People know where I was dispatched," Remak said, "but I hadn't reported anything yet. I hadn't
found
anything yet."

"Just my parents." Laura said it as if it were a joke. "I don't think they're going to come looking for me."

"No," Isabel said. "I didn't have a chance."

Brath, his eyes suddenly dull with lack of interest, pulled his gun from behind his back and shot Isabel in the head.

The force flung her backwards, and Laura, standing just beside her, stumbled backwards, too, from shock or survival instinct.

"Jesus!" someone shouted.

"Oh, my God!" another voice cried.

Mal hadn't been hit by the bullet, but his head split apart. What was Brath doing? This was beyond even the worst of what had happened so far. Mal's arms and legs were paralyzed from the shock.

Brath turned the automatic on Laura, who, through plain bad luck, happened to be next in line. Mal wanted to move,
needed
to move, to protect her, to stop Brath. Suddenly, Mike was in front of her, between her and the gun, throwing his arms around her, tackling her to the ground, and covering her with his body.

The gun didn't go off again. His mind nearly spinning off its axis, Mal saw Remak chopping down at Brath's wrist with stiff fingers. The gun sprang free, but Brath struck Remak in the face, sending him backwards, and this struck Mal into full awareness. He moved in toward Brath, who dodged away and went for his gun.

Suddenly Mal's eye was drawn beyond Brath to Laura as she pushed at Mike's chest, trying to get out from under him. Mike rolled off her, his face an incongruous mask of bitter shame in the midst of this frenzy. She scrabbled away without even looking back at him and snatched the gun off the ground just as Brath made a grab for it.

She had the gun and scrabbled backwards on her knees as he loomed over her. Mal caught up to Brath, grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him around, and looked into his face, trying to see something, anything he could recognize.