What the Hell Did I Just Read

11. THIS ISN’T WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE, I SWEAR

Me

Coming back from Chastity Payton’s house, I was worried that when we pulled into the Venus Flytrap parking lot, we’d find Ted Knoll waiting for us again. He wasn’t.

Instead, it was Detective Bowman.

He stepped out of his cop SUV and met us at the foot of the stairs. His young partner stayed in the car.

As I approached, I said, “Are you here to give us our reward? For finding the girl?”

“I think you can guess why I’m here.”

I headed up the stairs and Bowman followed.

John said, “You don’t have a warrant. That means you can’t come in unless we invite you.”

Bowman said, “You’re thinking of vampires.” He walked into the apartment after us, shaking rainwater off of his jacket.

I said, “So, I take it you’ve heard from Mr. Knoll.”

“Actually, I had a long conversation with Maggie. Where were you last night, between the hours of two and three A.M.?”

“Asleep. In my apartment.”

“Anybody that can verify that?”

Amy said, “I can.”

I said, “No, she can’t, she was at work.”

“I came home at three. Night lunch. You were asleep.”

“Anyway, then I woke up in the predawn hours because you needed me to do your job for you. Remember that? You gave me the finger and drove merrily into the night? Then we solved your case?”

“And now I have the victim pointing the finger at you, and an extremely convenient failure of the victim’s Littleton alarm system, with your girl in position to sabotage it.” That clearly startled Amy. I hadn’t mentioned that part to her. Still, she said nothing. “And the father, he’s made an ultimatum—either we haul you in, or he buries you himself.”

“Then arrest him.”

“He hasn’t committed a crime yet. That would be for after he shoots your ass. And that’s only if he refuses my offer to help him get rid of the evidence.”

“Even if you think I did it, aren’t I also the guy who brought her back? So what’s the charge there, we took a little girl to visit Mine’s Eye then brought her back home eight hours later? For what? We didn’t even get paid for the work.”

“And then we found out there was another victim. At least one.”

I said, “You think I did both? At the same time, across town? And never got spotted? It’s weird how you switch between having a really high opinion of me and a really low one.”

He shrugged. “Well, somebody did it.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t a person. Which you know damned well.”

“Do I know that?”

John said, “So, now if we go and find the other kid, that just casts more suspicion on us? Well, guess what—we’re going to go find him anyway. I’m sure you understand, at this point heroism is just a reflex for us.”

I said, “And just to be clear, the only way to prove to you that we weren’t behind this would be to successfully find the guy who did it, and for it to turn out to be an actual human being you can book and prosecute. Right?”

“Actually, Wong, if I see you anywhere near any of the victims’ families again, or see you talking to witnesses, or otherwise doing amateur cop stuff, I will haul all three of you in for interfering with a police investigation. And I’m using the word ‘haul’ here to describe tying you to the rear bumper of a squad car and dragging you across town. You’re going to stay home, you’re not going to leave town, you’re going to wait for me to tell you what to do. Understand?”

I said, “Of course. What you say goes. After all, you’re the police.”

He turned and opened the door and was aaaallllmost all the way out, when there was a thump from another room.

We all turned, including Detective Bowman.

Another thump, like someone kicking a door.

Coming from inside my junk room.

The detective said, “Who else is here?”

Simultaneously:

Amy said, “It was the wind.”

John said, “It’s the dog.”

I said, “I don’t hear anything.”

The detective pulled his gun and said, “Get back. All three of you, go to the other side of the room.”

We did.

Thump

I said, “I don’t want you to take this as a threat, but the last cop to come into my house and yank open doors to investigate strange sounds, well, he kind of wound up with a monster in his face. And I don’t mean it was near his face, I mean it was literally inside his face.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Still, he approached the closed junk room door like he thought a velociraptor would come crashing through it at any moment. He positioned himself outside the door and, with his gun held close to his body where an assailant couldn’t grab it, he reached out with his left hand and pushed the door open.

He jumped back from the door to create distance, then trained his gun on whatever horror was in the room. From where I was standing, I couldn’t see inside but I mentally prepared myself to go running out the front door if he got yanked into the room by jaws, paws, tentacles, or a beak.

The detective looked inside, took in what he was seeing, then spun and aimed his gun right at me.

“Get down! Get on the floor! All three of you!”

“What is it?”

“GET DOWN!”

We obeyed, the three of us exchanging looks. I had already pretty much guessed what he had found in there. Amy seemed quite sure she knew.

The detective grabbed his walkie-talkie and called in a squad car and an ambulance.

He had a young child, he said.

Alive, but unconscious.

* * *

We were handcuffed in the back of Detective Bowman’s SUV—Amy’s right hand cuffed to a belt loop—and had been sitting there long enough to see the sun go down. Red and blue lights flashed across the beads of water on the windshield. The employees of the Venus Flytrap had all gathered up front, muttering to each other, covering their mouths in shock. I watched as Chastity pulled up in an old but impeccably maintained Range Rover. She jumped out and ran toward the stairs, then was restrained by a pair of street cops, reassuring her that her little boy would be right down.

Then a paramedic carried Michael Payton’s tiny body down the stairs, the boy wrapped in a blanket. Chastity easily shoved the two cops aside and flew up to snatch her baby from the paramedic and clutch him to her chest. A Channel 5 news team was there to get it all on camera, as were most of our neighbors—word travels fast anytime there are cop cars at the Wong residence. The child and Chastity were loaded into an ambulance and soon after, a crime scene team started filing up and down the stairs, all of them about to be very confused by the shit they would find in my apartment. Will somebody in the evidence room be in charge of figuring out what that clown painting is saying?

Detective Bowman’s partner, the square-jawed dude with the fancy hair, climbed into the passenger seat of the SUV. Bowman was standing under the awning of the dildo store, talking to one of the crime scene techs, hopefully warning them about grabbing anything in the apartment with their bare hands.

To Bowman’s partner, John said, “The only thing that bothers me about this bullshit is that I’m pretty sure the real bad guy is still out there. You know we didn’t do this, and you know you need us. So what good does booking us do, other than let you cover your ass by closing the case?”

He said, “Shut your trap. I’ve got no patience for this bullshit.”

Bowman slid into the driver’s seat. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I said to him, “Will you just listen to us? You know this isn’t going to trial. This stuff never goes to trial. The prosecutor probably looks these cases over, shakes her head, and pours herself a stiff drink while figuring out how to explain to the press why she dropped the charges. Every time.”

Amy said, “Guys, he’s not taking us to the police station.”

Bowman glanced back at us and said, “She’s right. Got a new procedure these days.”

He drove us south, past some cornfields and around the scrap-yard, where we’d seen the guy hunting the BATMANTIS??? on Chastity’s video. We turned into the lot of a large building that had been a farm supply store years ago, but had apparently been renovated and reopened under new management. The only marking was a nondescript sign at the entrance of the parking lot declaring it the IAEEAI LAB AND WELLNESS CENTER.

Sitting in the parking lot were several trucks, the kind of flat-black military vehicles that you see around Undisclosed now and again, and that you generally pretend you didn’t see.

I’m not sure how many members of this shadowy organization John and I have killed over the years. This is partly because I’m not sure which of their employees were ever actually alive and partly because I’m never clear if it’s the same organization from one time to the next. Do you have that one corner in your town that’s a different restaurant every two years—a burrito shop, then a Chinese place, then a Pop-Tart buffet—because nobody can ever make it work but they keep trying anyway? Well, it’s kind of like that, only instead of trying to squeeze a profit from a shitty location with no parking, they’re trying to control vast, dark energies they barely understand. And, instead of skipping town once the lease runs out, they suffer screaming, spurting deaths that are but a warm-up for the unending frenzy of ravenous jaws that await them beyond the veil. But, hey, maybe it’ll work next time, guys!

John and I had once dedicated ourselves to investigating the origins and power structure of this group, a task that we diligently pursued for more than twenty minutes while waiting for a pizza delivery to arrive. A Google search found sites full of animated GIFs tracing it all back to either an occult-obsessed nineteenth-century billionaire, a 1961 Soviet military teleportation experiment, the Illuminati, or “The International Jew” (the pizza arrived before we could find out his name).

Bowman’s SUV rolled to a stop a short distance from the vehicles. That is, the completely dry vehicles, standing on completely dry pavement, in the middle of a downpour, in a parking lot with no roof. I thought I could see raindrops splattering and bouncing off an invisible barrier overhead. I sighed. They apparently hadn’t wanted to get wet.

Out of the trucks walked a dozen figures in hooded black cloaks, like the guys who had shown up at John’s place a few weeks ago. Or, maybe it was the exact same guys, who knows? Under their robes they were wearing modern body armor and they were carrying bulky weapons with no obvious holes where bullets could come out. They all wore those droopy masks—at least, I think they were masks. They formed a circle in the parking lot and started chanting and drawing on the pavement with what looked like vials of blood.

Amy rolled her eyes and said, “Really?”

Detective Bowman took a drink from a flask he’d hidden under his seat and said to his partner, “You know, law enforcement has changed quite a bit since I was in the academy.”

A ramp was extended from the back of one of the trucks, and a pair of normal-looking humans in business attire used a hand truck to roll down what looked like a huge, black, featureless casket. They wheeled it out to the middle of the circle of chanting cloaks and set it up on end, like a vampire was about to walk out of it (note: vampires aren’t real).

One of the suits—a woman—gestured in our direction and Bowman said, “Will you willingly get out and walk over there, or do we have to march you over there at gunpoint? You know how I hate getting out in the rain.”

I said, “This isn’t right, Detective. You’re supposed to uphold the law. Whatever’s about to happen, you know damned well we don’t deserve it.”

“Hey, you know who else said that very thing to me? Literally every scumbag I’ve ever stuffed into that back seat.”

John said, “You see those guys out there summoning the devil or some shit, right?”

“Is that what you think they’re doing? Because I’m pretty sure all that witchcraft mumbo jumbo is supposed to protect them from you. And yeah, we’re dropping you off here because nobody’s sure a cell can even hold you. Now get the fuck out of my vehicle.”

We all glanced at each other, but short of trying to overpower the cops and steal their SUV, there weren’t a lot of options. His partner removed the handcuffs and we all stepped into the rain, took a few steps forward, and then were out of the rain.

Amy said, “Weird.”

“Hello,” said a stern-looking woman in a perfectly pressed navy pantsuit, striding toward us ahead of an even more stern-looking man with brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard. “My name is Agent Helen Tasker, my partner is Agent Albert Gibson.”

Later, there would be some dispute between John, Amy, and me about what names the agent had given us. But Helen Tasker and Albert Gibson is what I heard.

John said, “And you’re with…?”

“Fish and Wildlife,” said the male—Gibson—with a sneer.

I said, “So, are you the ones framing me on Nymph’s behalf, or are you also pursuing Nymph? Or are you just altogether clueless about what’s happening here? Honestly, from past experience with people like you, it could be any of the three.”

The female agent—Tasker—said, “We are here to gather information, that’s all you need to know. Now, to prevent you from coordinating, I am going to interview you separately, and simultaneously.”

Gibson walked over and opened the casket (or whatever it was—it was just a seven-foot-tall featureless box, with a door). The woman looked at me and said, “Mr. Wong, please step through the door, I will be right behind you.”

I said, “We won’t both fit in there.”

She didn’t answer. I stepped toward the door and, when I got close enough, heard moaning and wailing from the other side. A stench of disease and death wafted out. I felt my guts clench. Stepping through that door wouldn’t mean stepping inside the box. I would emerge … elsewhere.

At this point, things again get a bit mixed up in my memory.

John, Amy, and I all later agreed that each of us had stepped through the door of the black box and that each of us were questioned on the other side of it by the same female agent. But each of us remember being asked to go first, and none of us remember either of the other two being called. It’s like in the moment Tasker asked to speak to us, we simultaneously split into three separate timelines. If you understand how this sort of thing could work, please write down your explanation with as much clarity and detail as you can, then throw it in the trash because who gives a shit.

I took a breath, steeled myself, and stepped through.

I emerged on the other side and was no longer in that parking lot, or in Undisclosed. A stench hit me so hard that I thought my brain had shit my sinuses. I tried to breathe through my mouth but I swore I could taste it.

I was standing over a dying man, lying on a filthy cot at my feet. Flies crawled over a row of yellowed teeth rotting behind cracked lips. His midsection was covered by a wadded-up sheet that was encrusted with dried diarrhea. Out from under the sheet were jutting pale white sticks that were his legs, the feet black as if from frostbite, and missing half their toes. On the ground around him was a scatter of discarded rags that were red with sprays of coughed-up blood.

The man had just enough energy to turn his head toward me slightly and hiss the word “Water.”

Next to him was another man in a similar condition. Next to him, a skeletal woman, who appeared to be dead. I was, it turned out, standing in between two rows of fifty or so such cots, each containing an afflicted victim. Beyond each row was another row just like it. The grass beneath my feet was well-manicured and oddly artificial—Astroturf. There were rows of seats looming over us—a football stadium. Between the cots I could make out a faded New England Patriots logo in the turf.

I turned to find the door I’d stepped through but saw only agent Tasker. She said, “I’m sure this is a shock to you, but you understand we had to take precautions.”

“Where are we, exactly? There’s no plague in our Boston, right? This is the future or something? An alternate timeline?”

“What matters is that you cannot get back home until we reopen that door. To prevent your escape, we simply took you to a world into which you would presumably not wish to flee. You’re going to answer a few questions for us.”

“And then what?”

“That depends on your answers. But don’t bother lying, or I’ll know. In exchange, I will also not lie to you.”

The dying man next to me hissed, “… water…”

I said, “I assume we’re going someplace away from the, uh, pestilence? To conduct the interrogation? I’d prefer not to catch what these people have.”

“In this world, you’re never away from it. Your friend asked who we work for, and I am sure you’re wondering the same.”

I said, “Not really. People like you come to town, in your suits. You poke around, try to look smart, asking questions like you think you’re even capable of understanding the answers. Sometimes you act like you’re government, sometimes private, but I suspect none of you even know where your funding comes from. It doesn’t matter, it’s all the same. I’m guessing it always starts with some powerful people behind the scenes catching wind of what’s going on here and they come rolling in to … I don’t know. Try to take advantage of it, somehow? Try to harness the dark energies, to find a way to profit from them? Then it all falls apart and you pick up and leave, the rest of us go back to our weird little lives and try to muddle through. That cycle has probably been repeating itself since before this town was a town.”

“Our organization is known as NON. Non-natural Organism Neutralization.”

“Well, either way, one thing is always the same—you people never manage to improve the situation.”

“Would you prefer we left it to amateurs like you? Your dossier says you were once seen punting a severed head across your yard, while naked.”

“That was an isolated incident.”

“You understand that scenarios like these cannot be left to play out on their own? Innocent children, taken in the night. The people are frightened. Understandably so. Panic is a self-sustaining chain reaction. Order must be restored.”

“Hey, you want to fix this, go for it. I hereby defer to your judgment.”

“Word around town is that you had something to do with it.”

“The only word around this town is ‘meth’.”

“Why don’t you tell me a little bit about your history.”

“You just told me you have a dossier, you probably know more about me than I do. I was drunk for so much of it.”

“I want you to tell it.”

Another man came shambling by, in filthy rags that might once have been white. I realized to my horror that he was a doctor. He looked like he’d died of exhaustion a week ago and his body just hadn’t gotten the message. He didn’t even glance at us as he passed. The man on the cot rolled his eyes toward him and rasped, “… water…” but the doctor ignored him.

I said, “My history? Going back how far? To my birth?”

“To the start of your career, in this field.”

“I, uh, lived a normal life until high school. Got into some trouble, maimed a kid in a fight. You know, the usual stuff. Went to a party, there was a drug going around there. Everybody who took it had weird shit happen to them. All of them died but me and John. Now we can see monsters and it’s awful.”

“And now you have gained some prominence, due to that. It is, as they say, your claim to fame. Now, eliminate that element—all of your supposed paranormal abilities and self-reported heroism—and just tell me about your life, as a man.”

“Not much to tell.”

“I know. Tell it anyway.”

“Well … I worked in a video store for a while, out of college. Place went out of business, I’ve been in and out of work ever since.”

“Amy supports you. Financially, I mean.”

“We get by.”

“Because Amy supports you.”

“We help each other. What does this have to do with anything?”

“She has no family.”

“Is that a question?”

“Her parents were killed in a car accident.”

“Yes. When she was thirteen or fourteen, around there.”

“You’re certain.”

“I wasn’t there. Why would she lie?”

“Who’s saying she is?”

The guy at my feet asked for water again. I turned away from him, and looked instead at the victim in the next row. He was moaning, and one hand was absently scratching at his belly. He had been at it for a while, it seemed, because he had scratched all the way through the skin, then through the fat, and then through the muscle, creating a ragged hole next to his navel. A loop of small intestine had flopped out, like a pale worm. Flies were swarming over it.

I quickly turned away, focusing my gaze into the empty bleachers. My stomach was roiling from the stench, I swore it was seeping into my pores.

Agent Tasker said, “That’s the same car accident in which she lost her hand.”

“Yep. Can we please leave?”

“Her older brother acted as her guardian after that.” She paused, but I said nothing, because it wasn’t a question. From somewhere a few cots away, a child started screeching. “And what became of him?”

“You know what.”

“Do I?”

“He died under mysterious circumstances.”

“But not mysterious to you. You were there.”

“Oh, trust me. I’m just as confused as anyone. Is there a point to all this or are you just trying to piss me off?”

“My point is, now all Amy has is you. The man who she believes protects her from the monsters.”

“I don’t know what she believes, you’ll have to ask her.”

“I am, as we speak. If I were to go back and have her tell the whole tale from her perspective, would she speak of the same monsters? How much of it did she actually witness? How much of what she saw was seen in moments of panic in the darkness? How much were her memories augmented by the detailed stories written down by her beloved David, the only one she has in the world? The man she believes protects her from the very monsters he describes in such vivid detail?”

“Why are you obsessed with our relationship? How does that possibly matter, in this situation?”

“It all matters. The universe is a series of fulcrums, upon which fate tilts this way and that. A random application for an art school is rejected, and a young Adolf Hitler changes careers.”

“Are you saying Amy is the new Hitler, or I am? If it’s me, it just, you know, seems like a lot of work…”

“Would you say her life was better before she met you, or after?”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“Look past your defensiveness and try to grasp the context in which I am asking this. Imagine you were looking at this case from the outside, observing how the situation in Undisclosed has degraded over the last decade. If you could go back and pick one single person to eliminate from the equation in order to alleviate the maximum amount of suffering, who would it be?”

“Are you going to kill me, Agent Tasker? Is that all this is, you did the math and decided that I’m the problem? Well, shit, who am I to argue?”

“Even if that was my intention, I do not have the authority to do that.”

“Okay, do you need me to sign something or do you have to get your supervisor…”

“What I am saying is that the anomalous entity that exists in the Undisclosed coal mine is our concern, not yours. We will see to it that it is dealt with. If you want to slay the monster that stalks your town, well, there are numerous painless and quick methods. I have run the scenarios; I assure you that the outcomes are superior for virtually everyone involved. Especially Amy.”

“Jesus Christ, lady. Did you just tell me to kill myself? It’s like if the guardian angel in It’s a Wonderful Life went up to George Bailey on that bridge and was like, ‘Do it, you pussy.’”

“George Bailey is portrayed as the hero because he wanted to give cheap home loans to citizens who couldn’t afford them—the very practice that just caused a worldwide financial crisis in real life. We’d have been better off if he and everyone like him were, in fact, drowned in a river.”

“Well, I think you and your organization would be better off if you all drowned on my balls. Fuck you, you want me dead, man up and do it yourself.”

She glanced at her watch. “All right, we’re done here. Please step this way.”

“We are? You didn’t even ask me about the case. Hey!”

Amy

“Hello,” said a stern-looking woman in a perfectly pressed navy pantsuit, striding across the parking lot next to an even more stern-looking man with brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard. “My name is Agent Emily Wyatt, my partner is Agent York Morgan. To prevent you from coordinating, we are going to interview you separately, and simultaneously.”

The man opened the door to the device that to Amy looked like a big, black refrigerator from the future. The woman gestured to Amy and said, “Ms. Sullivan, please step through the door, I will be right behind you.”

Amy did as asked and when she saw what lay beyond the door, she clapped her hand over her mouth and just stood there, in shock. Rows and rows of dying people, on stretchers, covered in rags.

“Where are we? What’s wrong with these people?”

Agent Wyatt shrugged. “It’s always an apocalypse somewhere. It’s a world into which you do not want to escape, that’s all you need to know.”

“There’s a plague, or something? Is it worldwide?”

“What you’re seeing here is the work of a perfect bioweapon, one that quickly got out of control.”

“Perfect, meaning it killed everyone?”

“Perfect, in the sense that it didn’t. A corpse requires no further care or resources, so inflicting quick death is not the most efficient way to cripple an enemy. Instead, they developed a pathogen that would incapacitate a person within hours, rendering them unable to fight or work, requiring around-the-clock care and leaving them in that state indefinitely. And I mean decades. Wracked with pain, muscles seizing, unable to do anything but lie there and writhe as they rot from the outside in, all while leaving the brain and vital organs fully functional … until someone finally comes along and puts them out of their misery. Using the enemy’s sympathy against them.”

“That’s awful.”

“Ms. Sullivan, I need you to focus. Do you understand the gravity of the situation you and David have found yourselves in?”

“Are you seriously asking me that? Do you have any idea what we’ve been through?”

“Do you? What I’m asking, is David candid about what he does? About what he is?”

Amy started to answer, but the man at her feet said, “Water,” and she turned to kneel down over him.

She said, “Find some water.”

“Ms. Sullivan, we’re not here to intervene in—”

Amy got up and scanned the area around her, trying to find a nurse, or someone who looked like an authority figure. “Hey! Somebody! This man needs water!”

“You’re looking at the final stages of a worldwide pandemic. The system has collapsed, supplies have dried up. These people have been abandoned here, in twenty years this version of earth will be ruled by cockroaches—yet another world in which the bugs have won. That’s not our concern today. Ms. Sullivan, I suspect that David has not been completely honest about—”

“I’m not saying another word until you get this man some water.”

The agent had a look like she was entertaining a series of murderous fantasies, but ultimately decided it was easier just to comply. She reopened the doorway—which appeared right there on the turf, standing freely—and yelled for someone to get her a bottle of water. A moment later, she handed Amy a bottle of Fiji Water—a ridiculous brand drank by rich people—and Amy trickled a little into the mouth of the dying man. He sputtered and coughed, then closed his eyes and went back to sleep, or passed out. No “thank you,” no expression of relief. Just some dim awareness from deep down in the dark caverns of his misery that one part of him felt a little better.

Amy looked up at Agent Wyatt and said, “Thank you.”

She shrugged. “It hardly matters here.”

“It all matters. You’re not the cops, so you know that what happened with those kids is the work of something bigger than me or David or some random creeper around town. So are you here to help us stop it, or to get in our way?”

“You buy into David’s mythology? Monsters and ghosts and demons? And that you’re some kind of a select group of chosen ones who are humanity’s last hope?”

“Ha, nobody has ever called us that. I just try to help whoever’s in front of me. That’s enough to keep me super busy.”

“But you believe the kidnappings are the work of some kind of paranormal entity. A monster. One that only you can stop.”

“You go read up on ‘monsters’ and you know what you find? Every culture has the same ones—even civilizations who never talked to each other. Every culture has demons and vampires and stories of people who turn into animals. They all just put their own little spin on it—in Europe it’s werewolves, in Asia it’s were-bears, in Central America they’re were-jaguars. But it’s all the same because it’s all for the same reason.”

“Because they’re real, you mean?”

“No, because it’s all just an excuse for people to kill each other. Your kid gets attacked by wolves, there’s no way to get revenge on the wolves, so you blame the village weirdo. ‘I saw that guy turn into a wolf!’ All the legends can be traced back to something like that—people needing a scapegoat. They’ve found old skeletons with stakes through their rib cages, where the villagers went crazy and stabbed some poor dude because they decided he was a vampire, when he was probably just an insomniac with anemia. Witches, they were just any elderly women in the village who never got married—the men decided they were old and ugly and worthless and so they blamed them for every disease and bad batch of crops. Just burned them alive, no family to come to their defense. They didn’t have witch hunts because they believed in witches. They believed in witches so they could have witch hunts.”

“You think that’s why we’re here? To carry out a witch hunt?”

“I think you’re here for the same reason as the witch hunters. To lay blame for something you can’t understand.”

“So if you ran into what others called a monster, you would show it mercy? Protect it? Become its friend?”

“Yep, probably.”

“Even if it put the world in danger? This is not a hypothetical. I need you to understand what I’m saying. There are entities out there who will use your pity to their advantage. Look around you.”

Amy sighed and surveyed the rows of afflicted moaning around her. “Yes, Agent Wyatt, clearly the problem with the world is that we humans are just too darned merciful. Are you going to ask me questions about the actual case?”

“I already have. Step back through the door, please.”

John

“Hello,” purred the woman in the form-fitting suit and skirt, sauntering toward John along with a tanned Latino man with a beard and designer sunglasses. “My name is Agent Josaline Pussnado, my partner is Agent Sax Cocksman. To prevent you from coordinating, we are going to interview you separately, and simultaneously.”

She stared into John’s eyes and said, “You first. But I’m telling you now, if you so much as raise a threatening eyebrow in my direction, I’ll replace it with a bullet hole the size of a golf ball. Am I understood?”

John said, “You might not find me so easy to kill. But I’ve got questions of my own, so let’s get this shit over with.”

John stepped through, saw the arena full of diseased humanity, and lit a cigarette. The place smelled like a stew made from cabbage and zombie scrotums.

“So in this dimension, this is their national sport? They line up all the sick people and fans buy tickets to come see which one dies first? Disgusting.”

“Shut up,” said Agent Pussnado. “Hold still.”

She ran a wand up and down John’s body, as if searching for hidden weapons. When it passed over his crotch, it let out a threatening buzz.

John said, “Your machine is broken. There’s no metal in there. Not yet.”

“It doesn’t detect metal,” she said, glancing at his groin. “It detects danger. Now, we know your friend is behind the disappearances of those kids. The only reason we haven’t shackled him and thrown him into a deep, dark place is that we’re also sure he’s but one piece of the puzzle. Either he’s working in conjunction with something, or on its behalf.”

“And also, you’re not sure if he can be shackled.”

She didn’t respond, but John knew it was true. John said, “You think what you think purely because They want you to think it. You’re dancing right along to their tune, like those dancing cats they have in Japan.”

“I’ve literally never heard of—”

“All these signs point to Dave only because the thing behind this wants you to go after him. Amy, too, all that stuff about the security cameras—they want us out of the picture, and are using you as a tool.”

The man on the cot nearby whispered something. John leaned close enough to hear the man say, “… kill … me…”

The woman said, “Your loyalty to your friends is admirable. But the day is coming when you are going to have to make a terrible decision. Will you?”

The man on the cot started screaming. Something was writhing in his abdomen, thrashing under the skin, trying to tear its way out. There was a ripping sound, and out from the man’s belly came a hideous creature, some horrific parasite having hatched inside him. It had teeth where its eyes should be and where its teeth should be, more teeth.

John looked around for a weapon and found a nearby flamethrower. He picked it up and unleashed a torrent of fire that consumed parasite and host alike, the man screaming out his gratitude for having been put out of his misery. Soon, other parasites were hatching all around them, one disease-ridden victim after another giving birth to their unholy offspring. John spun the flame thrower in an arc, setting everything in the vicinity ablaze.

The fuel quickly ran out. John tossed the flamethrower aside and picked up Agent Pussnado from where she was cowering on the turf.

“Will I do what has to be done?” he asked, sneering at her. “What do you think? Now let’s get the hell out of here. I’m thinking the Patriots aren’t making the playoffs this year.”

John spotted where the portal had opened at the end of the row. He yanked the woman off her feet and hauled her toward the doorway, a horde of the skittering dog-sized parasites in pursuit. John tossed the agent through the open portal and spun to face the onslaught. He snatched his switchblade from its ankle scabbard and stabbed a thrashing parasite as it launched itself at his face. John’s entire shirt was ripped from his body.

“Just come through and close the door!” screamed Pussnado, from the other side of the portal. “You can’t kill them all! It doesn’t matter!”

John slashed another of the parasites, then another. He glared at the woman over his shoulder and said, “It all matters.”

Me

I found myself back in the parking lot, standing next to John and Amy, facing the two agents and unsure if anything had actually happened. It didn’t feel like we’d moved. The dozen cloaked figures who encircled us each had their strange weapons at the ready. I wondered if we ducked at the right moment if they would all just shoot each other.

John looked around as if confused and said, “Did we, uh, pass?”

The female agent I knew as Tasker said, “If we allow you to leave this place, what will you do?”

I said, “Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Amy will go to work, I’ll go home and masturbate, John will go to his place, feed his dog, and also masturbate probably. You’ll never hear from us again.”

“You are a practiced, yet unskilled, liar. I know that you will continue to pursue a resolution in this case. We cannot allow you to do that.”

“But you already said you don’t have permission to kill us.”

The male agent, Gibson, said, “It’s believed by our superiors that you are surrounded by a blowback sphere.”

I said, “The last three syllables of that sentence were nonsense to me.”

“They think any attempt to kill you will automatically recoil on us and our organization via some unnatural means. I say it’s bullshit, but it’s above our pay grade.”

Actually, I thought, the people who are nice to us also meet with horrific misfortune. I think it’s a proximity thing.

John said, “What, like we’re protected somehow? Like we’ve got a guardian angel, or a force field?”

Tasker said, “I assure you, the forces shielding you are in no way angelic. If you are protected, it is only so that you can carry out Their will. Strings are pulled to clear the path wherever you go, surely you’ve sensed that.”

I said, “Holy shit, I’d hate to see what my life would look like if I wasn’t getting help.”

“Exactly,” said Tasker. “But, while you cannot be harmed, there are alternatives available to us.” She nodded at one of the cloaks. “Do you know what their weapons do?”

I said, “No, but I’ve always been curious to find out.”

“On their current setting, they simply change your mind. I don’t mean they convince you, I mean they change your mind completely. Forge new, somewhat random connections in your brain. They leave you perfectly healthy, but also completely unaware of who you are, how you got here, or what you’re fighting for. You won’t know your name, you won’t recognize each other. You will be wiped clean, then each transported to separate locations with new identities. You will start your lives over as new people. You will no longer have any urge to interfere with the situation here, but will be otherwise physically and psychologically healthy, and thus should not trigger this supposed dark sphere of protection that surrounds you. The best of both worlds.”

Amy said, “You can’t do that.”

Gibson said, “Hey, babe, it’s better than a bullet.”

“Put us together. Just do that. If you wipe us, put us in the same house, or the same town. Let us find each other again.”

Tasker said, “We can’t do that, for obvious reasons. The goal isn’t to have you spend six months reverse engineering your lives to wind up right back here. The goal is for you to start anew, and never feel the compulsion. Don’t worry, you won’t miss David. You’ll never know he was ever in your life. There’ll be nothing to miss. It’s like when they do surgery on an infant—they don’t bother with anesthesia before they slice into its chest, as they know it will not remember the pain.”

Amy turned to me and said, “I’ll find you. Somehow.”

Tasker said, “No, you will not.”

John said, “This plan is idiotic. Supernatural shit is still going to show up at each of our doorsteps, and when it does we’re going to get on the Internet and research it and you know what we’re going to find? Stories about us. The past will all come rushing back.”

“Those Internet searches will turn up nothing. Where you’re going, those articles do not exist, because those events won’t have happened.”

“Oh,” I said. “When you said we would be relocated, you didn’t mean we’d be dumped off in Arkansas. You meant we’re each going through the door.”

“One at a time. Each to a different world.”

John lit a cigarette and said, “No. You’ll have to kill us.”

“No, I won’t. It’ll be just like waking up from a deep sleep, you won’t feel any desire for revenge or even a faint sadness about what you lost. You will be curious about your amnesia, of course, but when you go searching for your old identity, there will be nothing to discover.”

Amy’s arms were around me.

She said, “David, they can’t do this. They can’t.”

She’ll be happier.

John, now showing genuine alarm, said, “So, you take us out of the picture and the thing in the mine smashes its way out and starts impaling all of humanity on its million barbed penises. What then? Your people have to desperately track us down and beg for our help? Reprogram our brains back the way they were?”

Gibson said, “Getting you out of the picture is our only hope for keeping the entity in the mine contained, asshole.”

I said, “Yeah, I can actually see that.”

Tasker looked at John and said, “You’re considering running, maybe trying to take me hostage. Just remember—we choose where that door goes. You make this hard for us, and you’ll wake up in a world where the sky is black and worms crawl out of your rationed meat. Go easy, and I’ll send you someplace that’s pretty much like this.”

John said, “Do you have one where Tupac is still alive?”

Amy said, “Give us a moment to say good-bye.”

And time to think, I thought.

Tasker said, “Again, what’s the point of a good-bye that won’t be remembered?”

Amy said, “What’s the point of all this explanation, if it won’t be remembered? Why didn’t you just shoot us with your brain rays right off the bat?”

“Isn’t it obvious? This alleged invisible hand that protects you, I wanted to know that it wouldn’t reach out to stop us at the moment of decision. It didn’t. Now, I have a busy night ahead, so…”

Tasker nodded to the nearest cloak—his sagging face had a gray rubber mustache—and he pointed a thing at me that looked like a robotic elephant’s detachable dick.

I recoiled. Amy threw herself in front of me and John said, “WAIT!”

There was a pop, sounding like a gunshot echoing in the distance. I didn’t feel any different. Then the cloak with the elephant dick gun slumped to his knees, black blood running freely from what was supposed to be his forehead. As he went down, he fired his weapon wildly, an impossibly bright blue light blasting forth and hitting Agent Gibson right in his face.

Gibson got this weird look in his eyes. He blinked and took in what surrounded him, seeing first the three of us, who looked harmless enough, and then the circle of ominous black cloaks with their alien arsenal. One of them stepped forward and raised its weapon at us, looking to finish the project begun by his colleague.

Gibson’s eyes went wide and instinct took over. He pulled a gun from a shoulder holster and in one reflexive motion put the cloaked thing down with a headshot.

Tasker screamed, “DROP IT!” and drew her own weapon on her rogue partner. But Agent Gibson, frantic over his inability to remember who the hell he was, had shifted into fight-or-flight mode. He spun, saw the gun pointed at him, and shot his fellow agent in the chest.

Eyeballs swollen with panic, he turned and ran, firing in front of him to clear a path through the cloaks. John, Amy, and I followed. I was about to yell for somebody to steal one of the NON trucks, but the moment we ran off the parking lot and hit the road, Gibson turned and saw the three of us in tow. Interpreting this as pursuit, he raised the gun toward me and pulled the trigger—

The man was blasted out of view by a Range Rover. It skidded to a stop in front of us, Chastity Payton at the wheel.

“Y’ALL GET THE FUCK IN HERE!”

We crammed ourselves into the back seat and she sped off into the night. There was a hunting rifle with a scope propped up on the front seat next to her.

Chastity craned her head around and said, “They following us?”

I said, “I don’t see headlights, but I don’t think they use them. You killed both of those dudes?”

“May they find peace in the next world, but their own choices took ’em there. If your people dress like that, you’re on the wrong side.”

Amy said, “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. The four of us, we’re gonna have a talk. And I’ll tell you right now, I’m just about sick of this shit.”

John said, “They’re coming!”

There was a black truck behind us, no headlights, coming fast. Chastity hunched forward and stepped on the gas. She had a determined look in her eyes that kind of scared me—a “They’ll never take me alive” look.

We soon found our lane obstructed by a slow semi, barely managing the speed limit. Chastity swung to the left to pass and immediately was almost obliterated by an oncoming car that honked angrily as it flew by. The NON vehicle was growing in the rearview mirror.

We reached an overpass, and Chastity swung out to the left lane and once again found oncoming headlights—another semi. This time she didn’t go back, she floored it, attempting to thread the needle. Everyone screamed.

She cleared the truck on the right and yanked the wheel over a split second before the honking juggernaut went whooshing past. I swore I heard it scrape paint off the side mirror.

The NON truck behind us had tried to follow.

It smashed directly into the eighteen-wheeler we’d just avoided.

Through the rear window I saw chaos, the truck’s trailer jackknifing and rolling across the overpass, cargo spraying down onto the roadway below.

John said, “Jesus.”

“You see,” said Chastity, “that’s why you want the Range Rover. Jeep would have tipped over doing that shit. Always got to be prepared, that’s what I say.”