John Dies at the End

We found Molly in the kitchen, standing on a chair and eating from a box of cookies that had been left open on the table. After some coaxing and threats we got her to follow us out to my truck. We loaded up, the engine growled to life. The windshield was a solid sheet of white.

Amy found the cardboard GhostVision glasses on the dashboard and examined them with a quizzical look. I found my ice scraper from under my seat and jumped out to scrape the ice from the windows. Outside I turned toward the house–

I stopped in my tracks.

I mumbled, “Oh, shit, shit, shit.”

There was a figure on the roof, silhouetted against the pearly moonlit clouds. Nothing but silhouette, a walking shadow. Two tiny, glowing eyes.

“What are you looking at?”

Amy, trying to follow my gaze.

“You can’t see it.”

She squinted. “No.”

“Get back in the truck!”

In a series of frantic bursts I managed to scrape a lookhole in the powdered-sugar crust of ice on the windshield, then jogged around to the back to do the same.

I heard Amy say, “Hey! What’s he doing up there?”

I leaned around the truck and saw Amy was wearing the Scooby- Doo ghost glasses and was staring right at the spot where Shadow Man was standing. She pulled off the glasses and looked at them in amazement, then looked through them again and said, “What is that thing? Look! What is it?”

“What—are you using the damned Scooby glasses?”

“I can see it! It’s a black shape and . . . it’s moving! Look!”

I did look, long enough to see the shape spout giant black wings. No . . . that wasn’t right. It became wings, two flapping wing shapes that didn’t quite meet in the middle. It flitted into the sky, a black slip against the clouds, higher and higher until it vanished.

I heard barking. Molly had gotten out of the truck, was at my knees.

Amy kept staring up, her mouth hanging open, steam jumping out in little puffs. She said, “David, what was it?”

“How should I know? They’re shadow people. They’re walking death. They take you and you’re gone and nobody knows you were ever there.”

“You’ve seen them before?”

“More and more. Let’s go, let’s go.”

We climbed in, called to Molly. She didn’t move, stood stiffly, trembling, growling at the sky. I called to her again, got out, picked her up and threw her inside.

I jumped in, floored it.

We fired down the road, fishtailing on the glaze of skating-rink-caliber black ice left over from the road graters. The house shrank in the rearview mirror. Beyond it, the low, flat Drain Rooter factory.

Amy twisted in her seat and peered back through the rear window, then did the same with those stupid ghost glasses. Molly was up and dancing behind us, bouncing around, probably thinking she’d be safer out on foot. Amy squealed, “Look! Look!”

I gave it a glance in the mirror, saw high headlights behind us, probably a Rooter truck leaving with a load. I did something they don’t teach you in driving class, which was to lean my head out into the blistering wind and look up, steering blind with one hand.

Black shapes were swirling overhead, winged things and long, whipping forms like serpents. Swirling, stopping, turning, like bits of debris in a tornado.

They were congregating around the factory.

Most of them were. Some of them were breaking off and following us, dark shapes flitting across the sky and into the shadowy trees and houses around us, vanishing from view. I pulled in my head and focused on the road.

Amy sat forward and strapped her seat belt on, screamed, “What do we do?”

“We’re doing it.”

Another glance into the mirror, headlights closer now. Trucker hauling ass, hauling drain cleaner.

A shadow flicked across the hood.

I stomped the brakes, the Bronco spun out, skidded, plowed ass-first into a bumper- high snowdrift alongside the road. Silence for a second, then the apocalyptic sound of eighteen wheels skidding on ice.

The semi jackknifed, the front end stopping and the heavier rear still pushing forward, toward us. A giant cartoon plumber, a red “X” through him, loomed in the windshield.

The trailer skidded to a stop about six feet from the bumper, then rocked threateningly back and forth, deciding whether or not it wanted to tip, clumps of snow spilling off the roof with each sway.

Silence, save for the tick of the engine and the rushing of the wind. Finally, Amy said, “Are you all right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

I was scanning the sky for shadows. I glanced at the red cab of the semi, could see somebody moving inside. An elbow.

A hand clamped on my arm. Amy whispered, “There. Over there.”

She was pointing, with her handless wrist, God bless her, at a black shape growing on the side of the semi, several shapes, molding together, forming something like a spider. Sitting there on the white wall of the trailer like a piece of black spray- painted gang graffiti.

The little hand clamped tighter on my forearm, hard, like a blood- pressure cuff. A low growl from Molly, who had backed up all the way to the rear wall of the Bronco, pressed against the rear door like she was trying to escape by osmosis.

“David, go. Go.” Amy was whispering it hard, harsh hisses of “GO GO GO GO GO . . .”

I slammed on the gas. The tires spun. Spun and spun and spun. Four- wheel drive. Two wheels buried in packed snow, two wheels spinning on ice.

The shadow spider moved, blurred, flicked across the length of the tractor trailer and appeared right next to the cab. Just a few feet from the driver inside. I threw the Bronco into reverse, then forward, rocking out of the ruts dug by the spinning tires, praying for traction.

“David!”

I looked up. The spider shape was gone.

I heard screams, curses. Rage. The driver had stumbled out of the cab, a big guy, tall and fat, a goatee.

The man was ranting, spit flying from his mouth, staring us down, fists clenched. Face pink with the effort of it. He turned his eyes on us. A rabid dog. “Cunt blood fucking cunt motherfuckers—”

Maybe he thinks we’re plumbers . . .

He stomped toward us and I could see them now, shapes moving around him, shadows wrapping around him like black ribbons twisting in the wind. And his eyes. His eyes were pure black now, the pupils and the whites gone in coal- black holes.

A few feet away from us now, trudging toward us like a robot. I slammed on the gas again, spun again, felt the rear end shift and then settle in, the tires making a pathetic, wet whine against the slush. A thin arm shot across my chest and it was Amy, reaching over and slapping the lock shut on my door a millisecond before the truck driver started clawing at the handle.

Crazed curses muffled by the door, his breath steaming up the glass. Tires whirring against ice. “FUCK YOU MOTHERFUCKING MOTHERFUCKERS EAT YOUR FUCKING—” A meaty hand smacked the glass.

The curses were replaced by a long, howling scream. The man stumbled back as if shot, a hand flying to his forehead. He stumbled, went to a knee, screeched like a saw blade on metal plate.

He exploded.

Limbs flew, flecks of red splattered over the windshield, Amy screamed. A head tumbled through the air, landed on the road and bounced out of sight. The tire sounds stopped. I realized I had let off the gas, was gawking at the looping remains of the man’s intestines, steaming in the frozen air.

The shadows, restless again. Crawling over the truck and the snowy ground around us, the things as stark as black felt in the snow- reflected moonlight. A tall one grew in front of us, almost the shape of a man but without a visible head and with too many arms. Molly went wild, barking and barking and barking, then melting into high, breathy whimpers.

I stomped the gas pedal one more time, got the tires spinning, heard bits of ice and dirt smack the fenders. The shape moved toward us, melting into the hood, walking through the engine block, moving across the hood like wading into a pond. It reached up with an arm, an arm as long as a man, then plunged it into the hood. The engine died instantly. The headlights went dark.

Shadow everywhere now. Movement, hints of it through the moonlight. Amy breathing next to me, quick, nervous gasps. For a long time, nothing happened.

She mumbled something, too low to hear. I glanced at her; she leaned in and said, “I don’t think they can see us.”

I didn’t get it at first but it almost made sense. Whatever they were, they didn’t have corneas and pupils and optic nerves. We couldn’t see them, normally. They were sensing us, feeling us out, searching without seeing.

I looked up, saw one shape flit away and disappear into the sky. Another, floating past the semi trailer, crawling over the plumber logo, then dissolving into the darkness.

I nodded, slowly, whispered, “They don’t belong here, in this world. They’re flying blind, with no eyes to—”

A soft thump on the window. Amy screamed.

Outside my window, inches from my face, was the severed head of the truck driver. A six- inch hunk of spinal column dangled from his neck, hanging in midair. His eyes were wide open, no sign of lids, two orbs twitching this way and that, taking us in. Amy was still screaming. Some lungs, that girl.

“Amy!”

The head pressed up against the window, squishing its nose, cramming its eyeball against the glass to get a look in. Its mouth hung open, lips pressed against the glass, teeth scraping.

“Amy! Plug your ears!”

She looked at me, saw me pull out the gun, pressed her forearms over the side of her head. I started rolling down my window.

I created a gap of about six inches when the head tried to ram into the opening, jaws working, teeth snapping. I jammed the gun in its mouth and squeezed the trigger.

Thunder. The head disintegrated, became a red mist and a rain of bone chips. I glanced at the gun, impressed, wondered about the loads the stranger had sent me. I leaned to the window and screamed, “You should have quit while you were a—”

“David!”

I turned. Darkness was falling around us now, pooling, the clouds over us vanishing behind living shadow. Suddenly it was dark, cave dark, coffin dark. I opened my mouth to tell Amy to run, to run and leave me behind because it was me they wanted and not her, but nothing came out.

I twisted the key, the engine turned over, stalled. I tried again, it fired to life, I stomped the gas. I floored it and we went nowhere, nowhere, nowhere and then lurched forward, across an unseen street, smacking into the drift on the other side of the road. I threw it in reverse, floored it again, spinning out and then crawling forward—

We were off. Out of the blackness and into the night, eating up the street, my hands strangling the wheel. The speedometer crept up, tires floating under us, like driving a hovercraft. I felt a hand on my arm again, Amy, breathing, whipping her head around, trying to see everything at once through the ridiculous cardboard glasses.

The night outside got darker and darker, shapes swirling around, blackness closing in, swimming in it, like being downwind from a forest fire.

And suddenly, Amy was gone. An empty seat.

And then I felt stupid.

Of course the seat was empty—I came out here alone and we had never found Amy; the house had been empty and we all knew she was actually wrapped up in a tarp in my—

The darkness swallowed me. The passing scenery outside was gone, no houses or grass or snowdrifts, like driving in deep space.

Shadow poured into the Bronco like floodwater. A blade of ice pierced my chest, cold flowing in like poison. My heart stopped. It was like strong, cold fingers reaching behind my ribs and squeezing.

And then I was gone, out of the truck, out of anywhere. A storm of images exploded in my head, crazed mental snapshots like fever dreams:

—looking down, a black crayon in my hand, drawing pictures of three stick figures. One drawn with long hair, one shorter with a spray of red at the top—

—under my car, my old car, my Hyundai. On my back, another guy next to me, long blond hair. I’m holding up a muffler and he’s threading in bolts, and I tell Todd we’re missing a bolt, that it rolled away, and he’s saying that the jack is tilting and GET OUT GET OUT BECAUSE THE CAR IS FALLING—

—running, breathing hard, through a ballroom in a Las Vegas casino. Chaos, then seeing Jim and knowing what I had to do, raising and firing and watching him go down, clutching his neck—

—blue canvas, knees in the snow, rolling a body, rolling it up because somebody could show up any second and it’s sooooo hard to move the deadweight—

Back. In the truck again, fingers clamped on the wheel. Plowing through deep snow, a mailbox flying toward me.

“David!”

I was driving in somebody’s front yard. I cranked the wheel, ground through a drift and landed in the street again. I saw Amy was back, in the passenger seat, pale as china. I reached over and grabbed her by the arm, pulled her over, like I could somehow stop her from getting sucked out of reality again if I hung on really, really tight. She screamed, “The light! Go to the light!”

No idea what she was going on about. Then I saw it, a pool of light in the pitch blackness just ahead. A flat of parking lot, a hint of an unlit red sign.

It was getting darker, blackness eating up the landscape around me, a power outage during a lunar eclipse. I cranked toward the embankment and jumped the curb, climbed over a little hill then landed with a lurch. I slammed the brakes, spinning on a white plane as flat as a hockey rink.

THUNK!

We smacked a pole, light bathing the interior. I saw out of the rearview mirror the sign for a new doughnut shop, the place still under construction but the parking lot lights on. And then I saw nothing at all, because blackness settled over everything outside the little island of lit snow we had settled in. In a second we were cut off from the universe, nothing in any direction, like we had submerged in a lake of oil five hundred feet under the ocean floor. Just black and black and black.

Silence. The sound of two people breathing. I felt a wet nose at my ear, saw Molly poking her head up, wagging her tail, bouncing back and forth on her paws, growling low under her breath.

Amy said, “They can’t get us! They can’t get us in the light! I knew it!”

“How did you—”

“David,” she said, rolling her eyes, “they’re shadow people.”

She rolled down her window, poked her head out into the night and screamed, “Screw you!”

“Amy, I’d prefer that you not do that.”

She pulled back in and said, “My heart’s going a thousand miles an hour.”

I looked out into the nothing, found the gun in my lap and squeezed it. A good luck charm at this point, and barely that.

Amy said, “Ooh! Look at that. What is—”

Little bits of light, moving around in the darkness in pairs. Twin embers, small as lit cigarettes, floating slowly around us. There were a few and then a few more, until dozens of the fiery eyes were peering in at us. And then, through the windshield, I saw color. A thin line of electric blue across the darkness, like a horizon. Then the blue line grew fat in the middle, expanding, widening like a slit cut in black cloth. It expanded until blue was all that was visible through the windshield.

It was an eye. The eye. Vibrant blue with a dark, vertical reptilian slit of a pupil. The hand on my forearm again. I thought Amy was going to break the bone with her grip. The eye twitched, taking us in. Then it blinked, and was gone.

The shroud of blackness was gone, too. Just the night now, shrouded stars and moonlit snow and a sad, dormant doughnut shop.

Amy said, “Are—are they gone?”

“They’re never gone.”

“What was that?”

Well you see, Amy, it’s like this. We are under the eye of Korrok. We are his food, and our screams are his Tabasco sauce.

Instead I said, “I’m not leaving the light.”

“No.”

Amy craned her head around, looking in all directions again, then took off the cardboard glasses. I looked down at the Smith and realized something, probably several minutes too late. I grabbed the barrel and offered it to Amy, butt- first.

I whispered, “Take this.”

“What? No.”

“Amy, that thing, with the truck driver? You saw how they took him over, used his body? Well that same thing can happen to me.”

And don’t ask me how I know that, honey.

“No, David—”

“Amy, listen to me. If I start acting weird, if I make a move at you, you need to shoot me.”

“I wouldn’t even know how to—”

“It’s not complicated. The safety is off. Just squeeze. And don’t get cute and try to go for my arm or some shit like that. You’ll miss. Just aim for the middle of me, jam it into my ribs. Shoot and get out, run for it. Don’t, you know, keep shooting me. Please, take it.”

To my surprise, she did. She turned the pistol over, the gun looking huge in her little hand. She said, “Well, what if it happens to me? What if they take me instead?”

“I can overpower you if I have to, get the gun away. But I don’t think it’ll happen. Not with you.”

“Why?”

I leaned back, suddenly feeling lighter without the gun. I swear the things generate their own gravity.

“It’s just a theory I have.”

Amy pulled her feet up on the seat and scrunched against me, shivering. The gun was in her right hand, laying across her hip and pointing vaguely at my crotch. There would be some real symbolism there, I thought, if this turned out to be a dream.

I said, “Besides, I don’t need the gun.” I held up my hands and said, “They passed a law that said I couldn’t put my hands in my pockets. Do you know why? Because they would become concealed weapons. I can kill a man with these hands. Or just one of my feet.”

She snorted a dry, nervous laugh and said, “Yeah, okay. I’ll watch out for you then.”

I again gripped the steering wheel with both hands, tendons tensing across my forearms like cables. I sat like that, in silence, for an eternity of minutes. A whole bunch of words trapped behind clenched teeth.

Finally, I closed my eyes and said, “Okay. Look. You need to understand something. About this situation, who you’re trapped in here with.”

“Oookaaaay . . .”

She twisted around to face me. Those eyes were so damned green. Like a cat. “Don’t, just—just listen. Do you know why I was in the special school, why I was in the BD class in Pine View?”

She said, “Sort of. The thing with Billy, right? The fight you got into with him? And then later when he—”

“Yes, that’s right. Listen. Men are animals. Get us together, take out the authority figures, and it’s Lord of the Flies. Billy and his gang, a couple of guys on the wrestling team, they used to make these videos. The kid, you know the Patterson kid, kind of fat? Anyway, they got him after school and tied him to a goalpost and shaved his head and all that, and it was hours before somebody found him, and by then, you know, the skin on his face was all blistered from the contact with the feces . . .”

Maybe you can cut back on the details a bit, hmmm?

“. . . and they have this party and they show the tape, show the tape of them torturing this fat kid and him just screaming. And they sat there with their beers and watched that tape over and over and over and that’s the way it is in high school. Shit that would get an adult put in a straightjacket is just brushed off. ‘Boys will be boys.’ ”

I hesitated, scanned the night for something, anything. I saw a lone bird on a power line, flapping its wings, but it didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

“Anyway, the Hitchcock guys, I had gym with them and they picked me outta the crowd. It became this daily thing. Little shit at first but they kept pushing it further and further and it took more and more to keep them entertained. And the coach there, he hated me, so he would make sure and not be there. I mean, I literally saw him turn his back and leave the room when they came after me one time, made sure I saw him do it. And one day they got on me and took me to this equipment room in back, this little storage area with shoulder pads and wrestling mats stacked all around and it’s hot as an oven and there’s this moldy smell of old sweat fermenting in foam padding. And things got crazy. Like, prison yard crazy. And eventually it ends and they leave me there and they’re walking out through the locker room and . . .”

Hmmmm . . . would she notice if I suddenly changed the subject?

“Well, I had taken to bringing a knife to school, not a switchblade or anything cool but a little two- inch blade on my key chain. It was all I had. And I get this blade free and I get behind Billy and I slice him, right up his back, a shallow little cut up his spine. It wasn’t deep but it got his attention and he fell over, thinking he was dead, blood all over the bench and the floor. And I got on him, sat on his chest and I started jabbing at his face, cutting, the blade bouncing off bone in his forehead and blood and . . .”

I thought long and hard about how to dress up this next part, but couldn’t think of a way. I wondered when the doughnut shop was scheduled to open.

Filling in the silence, Amy asked, “What did they do to you?”

“Let’s put it this way. I’ll never, ever tell you.”

She had no answer, which either meant she was totally unfamiliar with the concept or very well familiar. I pressed on.

“So, I wound up—”

—cutting out his eyes—

“—hurting him pretty bad, he lost his eyesight. I mean, like, legally blind. I wound up getting charged with aggravated assault and several other things that are all synonyms for aggravated assault. The school was talking a permanent expulsion. My dad—my adoptive dad—he’s a lawyer, you know, he had a series of meetings with the school and the prosecutor and it was a mess. They wound up testing me for mental illness, which I knew even at the time was a way to get me off because the case could be made that the school should have protected Billy from me, should have diagnosed me, whatever. I met with a counselor who had me talk about my mom and look at inkblots and role- play with puppets and draw a picture of how I viewed my place in the world. . . .

. . . and I knew it was a scam, a lawyer trick, but I kept picturing Coach Wilson turning his back, again and again and I figured, hey, screw them. The prosecutor, this bearded Jewish tough guy, didn’t want to push the charges. He said it was a five- on- one fight and shit happens, didn’t want to see me disappear into the jaws of the juvie justice system. The school backed off on the expulsion under threat of lawsuit and, bada- boom, I wind up spending my final year at Pine View.”

A speck of crystal landed on the windshield. A lone snowflake. Another landed a few inches away.

“So,” I said, “four months later Billy is adjusting to life without eyes, saying good-bye to sports and driving and independence and knowing what his food looks like before he eats it and never knowing if a fly has landed in his soup. He takes all of his pain pills at once. Demerol, I think. They find him dead the next day.”

Silence. Desperate to hear her say something, anything, I asked, “So how much of that story did you already know?”

“Most of it. There was a weird rumor that went around that you had snuck into his room and poisoned him or something stupid like that, with rat poison or something, which was stupid because the police would have noticed that.”

“Right, right.”

I started that rumor, by the way.

“You must have felt horrible when you found out. About Billy, I mean. That’d be awful.”

“Yeah.”

Nope.

What followed was the longest and most tense conversation pause of my life, like being stuck on a Ferris wheel with somebody you just puked on. Exactly like that, by the way. The truth was, I didn’t feel sorry for Billy. He teased a dog and got his fingers bitten off. Fuck him. Fuck everybody. And fuck you, Amy, for somehow getting me to tell you this. Sure, yeah, I felt bad about it, Your Honor. And that day years ago when I heard about the kids shooting up the school in Colorado I shook my head and said it was a tragedy, an awful tragedy, but inside I was thinking the look on the jocks’ faces when they saw the guns must have been fucking priceless. So, yeah, as far as you know, I felt just as bad about Billy as a good person would. And I’ll never, ever tell you otherwise. Never.

She said, “Still, who knows what he would have done to somebody else if you hadn’t—”

“I don’t feel bad about it, Amy. I lied about that part. When I heard, I felt nothing at all. I thought I would, I didn’t. The guilt just wasn’t there because I’m not that type of person. And that’s what I’ve been saying, that’s why you’re in danger here. I don’t think those things, those bits of walking nothing can use you, but I think they’d know me as one of their own. So keep the gun on me. And keep your finger along the side of the trigger and be ready to squeeze it as hard and as fast as you can.”

Silence again. Did I say that last silence was the longest and most awkward of my life? The record didn’t stand for long.

I would give everything I own to somehow take this conversation back.

I said, “We have no idea what they were doing to you, Amy, when those things took you all of those times. But they’re not going to do it again. This being scared bullshit, it’s exhausting for me. And you know, I reach a point where I say, you can kill me or tear off my arms or soak me in gasoline and set me on fire, but you won’t keep me like this, imprisoned by fear. Now, after everything I’ve seen, I’m not really scared of monsters and demons and whatever they are. I’m only scared of one thing and that’s the fear. Living with that fear, with intimidation. A boot on my neck. I won’t live like that. I won’t. I wouldn’t then and I won’t now.”

After a long time she said, “What do we do?”

“We sit here. Just keep the gun on me, okay? We’ll sit here and wait for the sun. Then I’ll talk to John. John will know what to do.”

I can’t believe you just said that.

CHAPTER 14

John Investigates

4:20 A.M.

John had decided to go to the Drain Rooter job site early to get a look around on his own. So while Amy and I sat camped out in my Bronco at the unborn doughnut shop, John was rolling his Caddie up the snowy road past Amy’s house. He didn’t get far, of course, arriving at a bundle of vehicles trying to unstick a jackknifed Drain Rooter semi tractor trailer.

Now, I wasn’t there, so this story is hearsay. If you know John, you’ll take the details for what they’re worth. Please also remember that, where John claims to have “gotten up at three thirty” to perform this investigation, it was far more likely he was still up and somewhat drunk from the night before.

John says he pulled up to the scene, which was roped off with yellow- and-black tape that announced it as a Hazardous Material Area. Several guys in yellow jumpsuits were milling around and cleaning the scene with some urgency, so of course he immediately decided to cross the DO NOT CROSS tape. Two steps in, John found himself standing on a faded pink stain on the snow, as wide as a car. He deduced that this was blood, though the truck driver’s body was gone. He stood over this large bloodstain and said, out loud and in the presence of several bystanders, “This is blood! David must have been here.”

At this point two elderly security guards in parkas, the guys who normally work the front desk at the plant, asked John to step behind the tape. John claims that here he told the guards that he could not speak English and when this failed to persuade them, he faked a violent seizure. I am unclear as to the purpose of this part of his plan. John flung himself down and began rolling around in the snow, thrashing his limbs about and screaming, “EL SEIZURE!!! NO ES BUENO!!!” in a Mexican accent. Half a dozen pairs of boots came mushing through the snow toward him.

From the ground, John saw something that stopped him cold. The semi trailer was, according to him, “bleeding from the ass.” John saw gallons of a red liquid running freely from the rear cargo doors of the truck, pooling on the road below, the stuff almost black in the moonlight. Several gloved hands seized him and dragged him through the snow, men in jumpsuits and protective masks. John squinted through the bustling team of men around the truck and saw several guys haul out a couple of blue plastic barrels, stained on the sides with the red substance that now seemed a little more like transmission fluid than blood. Dark and thick and oily.

Right behind them, several casket- shaped boxes were hauled out, the men carrying them like pallbearers. John stressed that these containers were not caskets but were merely casket- shaped, coated with several stickers that seemed to indicate some kind of biohazard. Not the sort of thing you would use to ship bottles of a household chemical to the local True Value.

Here’s where things get hazy. John claims that the men hauling him away from the scene were escorted by other men carrying submachine guns, though when pressed, he admitted that they may have been flashlights. Either way, John says the men threw him down and intended to execute him, at which point he kicked one of the men in the face and backflipped to his feet. He then wrestled away the man’s gun and “dick- whipped” him with it. I am unclear as to whether or not this means he struck the man in the groin or merely slapped him in the same manner in which he would slap a person with his dick. I never ask John to clarify such things. Anyway, he said he swung again and slammed another man’s skull with the gun, so hard it “made the batteries fly out.”

Next—according to John, of course—in one continuous motion, he “triple-kicked” a third man in the face, while shooting a fourth “right in his damned cock.” John, of course, knew that he couldn’t leave that man just lying there, screaming in pain. So he grasped him by the sides of his face and mercifully snapped his neck with a sharp twisting motion of his bare hands. At this point John says the rest of the hazard workers noticed what was going on and a chase ensued; he escaped by stealing a nearby horse. This is the first inconsistency in John’s account, because when the story picks up he is calmly driving his Caddie back down the road, past Amy’s house and away from the Rooter plant. I suspect that, in reality, either the men at the cleanup site didn’t see John at all or they merely gave him a dirty look until he turned around and drove away. Again, I wasn’t there and I do not wish to cast an unfavorable light on John’s personal credibility.

Undaunted, John turned off on a country road not far from the house. He wasn’t the first to have this idea tonight, he figured, because there were tire tracks in the snow leading up, and John figured the last person who came this way was doing what he was doing: getting around the accident.

A few minutes in he became sure he was right because the road seemed to circle back around to the rear of the old industrial park, which contained the Rooter plant along with an abandoned beans- and- wienies cannery, a Best Buy distribution center and a closed Hanes jockstrap jockstrappery. Just across the highway from that was the abandoned Undisclosed Shopping Centre with its rows of decaying stores where the only inventory was mildew, bats and squirrel families building nests out of used rubbers.

The gravel road and fresh tire tracks that John followed took him through a narrow strip of woods alongside the Rooter property. It was while passing through the leafy darkened canopy that he saw a flickering of lights off to his left, flashing between the tree trunks.

He slowed and stopped, seeing bouncing white beams that had to be men with flashlights, maybe a half dozen or so.

Shots rang out.

The lights vanished and John sat there for a few minutes before he picked them up again, farther down in the trees. He pulled forward a little down the road, peering into the woods, saw the flashlight beams stop and then blink out one by one. Whatever the men were looking for, be it a raccoon to boil or one of the guys’ contact lenses, they had apparently found it. He peered into the trees looking for more activity, decided that the group could have been mere redneck poachers or fraternity scavenger hunters, and stepped on the gas. The big Caddie crested a hill and when John saw what was below, he slammed on the brakes. A truck was down there, a heavy truck that looked military but didn’t have a military paint job. Flat black from head to toe. This was apparently the source of the tire tracks he had been following.

A group of men carrying what had to be rifles stood around the vehicle, and John immediately reached out and punched the switch to kill his headlights. Then it occurred to him that the lights suddenly going off might have been more noticeable. So he punched them back on, thought he saw two of the men turn toward him, and then quickly turned the lights back off again. Now he felt the strobing of his headlights was almost impossible not to notice; in fact, all of the men seemed to be looking up the hill at him. The group might have either pursued him or raised their rifles to perforate his windshield had a gorilla riding a giant crab not leapt out of the woods and eaten two of them.

You heard me.

John said the thing was as tall as the truck and walked on six legs that looked horned and armored like something seen at a seafood buffet. But there was a part that had the feel of a mammal, too, fur and arms. Please remember that from John’s distance the beast would have been the size of a dime, so I won’t criticize his crab- riding monkey description even though we all know it’s retarded.

The thing crawled away—sideways—with the legs of one man still kicking from its mandibles. Cracks of rifle shots rang out and little flares of muzzle flash lit up the snow at the foot of the hill. The men raced into the woods. John waited, then threw the Caddie into reverse and backed far enough down the other side of the hill as to be out of view of the army truck, though he claims that from that vantage point he could still see the truck, so that’s probably physically impossible.

Shots rang out from the woods. An animal screech rang out from the woods. Shots rang out from the woods again. More howls and then more shots, dozens, rattling over each other. Full auto fire. Screams.

There was silence for a moment and then John says he saw a single figure sprint out of the woods and head to the truck. The man jumped into the back, pulled out two small cases the size of lunch boxes and ran into the woods again. After a moment, more shots hammered the night air. The bestial screams again. More shots. More screams. More shots. There was a low, animal moan from the woods. The gunfire fell silent. John threw the Caddie in gear and was prepared to drive past the truck before the men returned, but he was too late because here was the lone man, running back. He was carrying the small cases, which seemed lighter now. He ducked into the truck again, emerged with two new cases, and returned to the woods. Gunshots resumed, followed by the screams of the monkey- crab.

This went on for about half an hour and then finally the noises stopped. Four men wandered out of the woods and mounted up in the truck. The truck pulled away. John followed. He passed a turn that led back to the Drain Rooter plant, probably to the employee lot, but saw that it was sealed off with a chain- link gate. If this had been an action movie, John thought, he would have rammed through it. Unlike a movie prop car, however, John was depending on the Cadillac to get him to work the next morning, and a punctured radiator would cost a week’s pay.

But more importantly, the truck he was following didn’t turn off at the gated road and he was now very eager to see where it went. John hung far back, content to follow the trail of the tire tracks. They kept going through the main access road for the industrial park and across the two- lane highway that intersected the road. The truck had continued onto the white canvas that was the parking lot of the dead Undisclosed Mall. It had circled around to the back of the eastern wing, one fork in the mall’s U-shaped floor plan.

John waited what he thought was a sufficient amount of time for the men in the truck to dismount and go wherever they were going, then cautiously drove around the building so he could see the truck parked near the ramp and boarded-up entrance of what would have been a department store had the mall ever bothered to open. John staked out the spot, saw nothing. He finally grew impatient and, being totally unarmed and without a flashlight or any kind of survival instincts, tromped over to a doorless doorway and walked in like he owned the place.

The cavernous space was as cold as a meat locker. Some moonlight spilled in from a framed hole in the roof, the skylight that had the glass shattered out of it last year. Snow had sifted down through the hole, leaving a coating at the center of the floor like spilled flour. Right across the edge of it were footprints. Five or six leading to an elongated skid that John assumed was created by a guy slipping in the snow and falling on his ass. John didn’t make the same mistake, circling around the dusting of snow and following the direction of the tracks. They led to a metal MAINTENANCE door and John paused to wonder if maintenance on this place was the easiest job in the world or the hardest. He found the door locked and claims he picked it. I’ve never known John to know how to pick a lock but I don’t claim to know all of his secrets. Maybe the guys just left it unlocked.

Anyway, John says he picked it and inside found a small, dirty, windowless room that seemed to be home to a lot of spiderwebs and dark scurrying shapes, but no exits. He flicked on his lighter and confirmed it. No doors, no hatches, no tunnels. Just like Amy’s bathroom, the trail led there and stopped. John turned to leave, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a doorway. He felt like an idiot because, how do you miss it, right in the middle of the wall like that? Tall, arched at the top, ornate. Totally out of place in a room like this. Then he turned to face it and saw that it was only a blank wall again.

He turned to the side, once more saw a blurry glimpse of the big door out of the corner of his eye. There, but not there, like an optical illusion. John went over to the wall and pawed around on the surface by the warm glow of the butane flame, looking for a lever or a seam or hidden hinges or something. After several minutes, he found it only to be a solid wall. He glanced at his watch—

5:06 A.M.

—and realized he had to be at the job site in less than half an hour. He left, guessing—rightly—that he would be back.

5:18 A.M.

I alternately turned the Bronco’s engine on and off so we could run the heater without poisoning ourselves with carbon monoxide, as I heard could happen if a parked car was left on too long. Especially this one, which smelled like rotten eggs from time to time anyway. I had always credited it to some sort of emissions problem, and I was sure it would remain even if I gave the truck a thorough cleaning, though I had never fully investigated that scenario.

Amy’s hair smelled like strawberries. She was leaning on me, her feet on the armrest of her door, the gun pointed somewhere in the direction of the glove compartment. There was a coating of white on all of the glass now, as if a sheet had been thrown over the Bronco. For the second time that night I had the very odd, weightless feeling that we were the last two people on Earth.

I said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Nope.”

“Why were you in Pine View? There’s barely anything wrong with you. And I have a right to know, you know, as a taxpayer.”

“The car accident. I missed school for a few months, had all kinds of problems when I came back. They had me on antidepressants and everything else. Well-butrin. I bit a teacher and wound up with the crazy kids.”

“You bit a teacher?”

She sighed and said, “Okay. One day me and Mom and Dad were driving, going shopping for school clothes. I was fourteen, about to start high school. I fell asleep in the backseat and woke up and felt like somebody was shaking me. Then I was upside down, my cheek pressed to pavement. Glass everywhere, blood every where. Dad had been thrown from the car, he died right there, two feet in front of me. His face was just—it was like a rubber mask. Just, nothing there. Mom was laying there, legs pinned under the hood, screaming. I was mostly okay but my back was twisted around and my legs were numb, my hand was caught under a door and I just laid there and told Mom to calm down, that help would be here soon. We laid there forever. And I could hear cars passing. I could hear them and it’s like, ‘why don’t they stop?’ Somebody, you’d think . . .”

She trailed off, turned to look out the side window, at nothing.

“They pulled me out and my hand was like, hamburger. Tendons and stuff curling out of it and, just gross. It was just barely on, hanging by like, a little strip holding it to my wrist. They’re putting me on a stretcher and my hand is just dangling, swinging back and forth. Mom died at the hospital. Jim wasn’t there, of course, he had stayed home so he was okay and he was freaking out, like it was his fault. They did surgery on my hand, put it back on. Then they did surgery on my back where I cracked a vertebrae. They put a little metal rod right—” she reached around and pointed to a spot between her shoulder blades. “—there. It made me a half inch taller. Isn’t that weird? I had a lot of pain, they’d put me in traction every now and then to kind of stretch me out and take pressure off it. And so the hand, it was a big problem. It worked for a few years, into high school, but then I lost feeling in these two fingers . . .”

Amy did something very creepy, which was to hold up her stump and point to a spot in space where the last two fingers would be.

“And they did surgery again. And again. The pain was unbelievable. That and my back, and I was on these pills, pain pills every four hours and they made me sick constantly. So they’d lower my dosage but those would wear off and I’d spend the last two hours counting the minutes to pill time again. So I was having to live with either the pain or the puking and I kind of had to pick.”

Antidepressants. The thought of this girl actually being depressed made me want to grab the whole planet and throw it into the sun. Well, more than usual anyway.

“And I bit a teacher. So eventually my fingers went numb again, almost all of them, and I couldn’t grip anything. I was dropping things. They had me staying with Uncle Bill and Aunt Betty and they were in the process of splitting up and they didn’t want me there. One time I dropped this glass thing, this little figurine, and Bill freaked out. I mean it’s not his fault they didn’t want me but what could I do? He yelled, and anyway the doctors said we had one last shot, one last chance to get the hand to work because the nerve tissue was dying off.”

She looked down and picked something off her sock. “So they did the surgery and I woke up in the recovery room and I was half out of it and I was dreaming that my hand was gone and I woke up and there it was. Gone. Just an empty space, white sheets where my hand should be. It looked so weird. I cried and cried and cried. Just, bawling. For hours. They knew, David, they knew they’d have to take the hand off. And they didn’t say anything. And I was just lying there and I knew, all at once, that I’d never be able to blend into a room again. You know?”

I grunted.

“And, no matter what I did or what I said, it’d always be, ‘Amy, you know, the girl without a hand?’ Everywhere I went. And the worst part is when you, like, meet somebody new and they don’t notice the hand right away, they don’t see it and you sit there talking to them and you’re just waiting, anticipating that moment when they’re going to notice. That look in their eyes at the moment they see it. Like they’re embarrassed for me.”

She went quiet.

I said, “This world kind of sucks.”

“I left. I went and stayed with Jim after that. I can still feel the hand, you know. It’s true what they say about that, ghost feeling in the limb and all that.”

“What, it itches or something?”

“No, it’s, like, clenched. I can feel my hand clenching and I can’t release it. Isn’t that weird?” She held up her good hand, squeezed in a tight fist. “Like this. I can actually feel the fingernails digging into my palm, on the hand that isn’t there. All in my head, I guess, something with the nerves. And it’s like that all the time. If I really concentrate, I can make it let up a little but it goes right back that way a minute later. That little twinge of pain is always there, a couple of inches into space where my hand should be. I wake up with it.”

I thought about telling her my own tragic story of the scrotal candle- wax incident, but figured it wouldn’t impress her. She crossed her arms and rubbed the cold from them and I put my arm around her to help. The gun was on the floorboard.

I said, “You know I was confused when I first saw you, right? At the house? I didn’t know where your hand went—”

“Well, I still had it in school—”

“—but John knew.”

“Well, yeah,” she said. “He used to come by.”

“Let me tell you everything you need to know about John. The reason I was surprised by your hand was because John never once described you as, ‘the girl with the missing hand.’ ”

5:36 A.M.

I don’t know what John did in the intervening time between when he left the mall and when he showed up at the Drain Rooter roofing site, but from past experiences with John I will extrapolate that he told a series of humorous stories about his penis, drank some sort of off- brand alcohol and then had sex with yet another girl who I secretly had a crush on but never got the courage to talk to. At some point he also changed into his roofing clothes, layers of flannel and cover-alls stained with tar.

The semi accident scene had been neatly cleared away by the time he passed it again, only a flat of tangled tire tracks as evidence. Steve the Roofing Guy was already at the rear of the building, talking to a security guard about roof access. This was one of the guards John saw at the trailer crash site. He didn’t know if the guy would recognize him or not, so he took a newspaper from the trash and held it in front of his face as he approached. Again, this is just what John told me, so, you know. Grain of salt. By six o’clock, thirteen men in Steve’s crew were swarming above and below the ragged roof hole, working as snow and ice runoff poured mini- waterfalls into the Drain Rooter break room. The drenched carpet and waterlogged candy bar machine were ruined.

John got on the roof and immediately saw that the hole was no ice collapse. Everything was flung upward, debris and boards and tile scattered on the roof like something blew out from inside. Tyler Schultz, a big blond Nazi Youth– looking kid who had jammed with John’s band off and on, made the same observation and said wasn’t that some weird shit. John told Tyler that frequently during sudden cold spells the warm air inside a heated building will expand, causing a building to partially explode for much the same reason balloons will burst if you fill them with warm air rather than cool. Tyler asked John if he was making that shit up and John said that he could look it up, knowing he wouldn’t.

John then took the stairs down to the wet break room, tape strewn across the hallways to keep employees from wandering in. The first thing he noticed was that the break room snack machine looked like it had been hit by a car, glass smashed in and shreds of candy wrappers all over the ground. While the guys were stomping around above him, getting a tarp set up and shoveling snow away from the ceiling wound, John wandered around and noticed a section of hallway that had been blocked off with the same black- and- yellow DANGER tape he saw earlier.

For the second time that day John ducked casually across some DO NOT DUCK CASUALLY ACROSS THIS TAPE tape and saw another hole, one in the wall, again like something blew through it. Something the size of a car or a giant crab with a monkey strapped to the back of it. And at the edges of the hole, there were scars in the drywall like scratches. Claw marks. John leaned in and peered through the jagged tear in the wall.

He saw a room that was clearly not on the floor plan. It was small, maybe the size of an average living room, and had absolutely no features. Four bare walls. Then John turned away from it and, as he did, saw a perfectly round hole in the floor as wide as the room, going down. Way down. John said it was the kind of chasm thing they have in all of the space stations in the Star Wars movies, for some reason. The ones crisscrossed with catwalks with no handrails.

When he looked directly at it, it was not there. A tiled floor. Just like at the mall. So the crab beast escaped from here, but the crew of guys sent to take it down returned to the abandoned mall. Everything came back to the mall, didn’t it? John thought about Robert Marley, the soy sauce Patient Zero who had squatted in the food court, and about Danny Wexler ranting about invisible doors. John decided this whole thing required a shitload of further investigation.

I SPLASHED WATER over my face and studied my own bloodshot eyes in the mirror. Glad to be back home, back in my bathroom. I pulled off my shirt and felt something catch back there. Something itchy. I turned to the side and looked into the mirror at my back. My breath caught in my throat.

There was something elongated, maybe a half inch long, protruding from my shoulder blade. Thin, like a needle. Pink.

Thump.

A knock at the door.

I leaned in close to the mirror, examining the growth and reaching back with my fingers, afraid to touch it. A shiver of revulsion twitched through my body.

Thump- thump.

A muffled voice, at the door.

“David? Hey.”

John’s voice. What was he doing here?

Thump thump thump.

“Hold on,” I said, pulling up a hand mirror from the drawer in the vanity. “I’ll be out in a minute. I’m, uh, shaving my balls.”

I held up the mirror, angled it to see the thing on my back, and almost screamed. The little protrusion on my back was a stalk that ended in an eye. A tiny black slug’s eye that twitched as the stalk began curling this way and that, as if getting a look around—

I JOLTED AWAKE.

THUMP.

I was cold. A searing pain in my neck. I smelled the sweet but artificial chemical smell of strawberry shampoo flavoring. Come to think of it, strawberries don’t have a smell. They just smell wet like grass.

Focus.

I felt something like a steel cable around my chest. I couldn’t move, a weight holding me flat. I pulled my eyelids apart, saw a set of eyes peering down at me through frosted glass. I blinked, looked down and saw copper red. A head full of red hair on my chest. An arm was around me, squeezing, a fist full of my shirt, twisting it.

I was lying with my head against the door of the Bronco, window roller pressing into my back, feet splayed across the bench seats, boot resting against the door across from me. Amy, however, looked rather comfortable since she had me to use as a self- warming mattress. She was curled up on top of me, breathing erratically, her eyelids twitching. Nightmares.

Get used to it, kid.

I craned my head and saw the blurred shape of John’s face through a hole he had wiped clean of snow. He waved at me, standing there in full work gear. My watch:

8:07 A.M.

My truck had died at some point because the engine and the heat were off. Amy and I untangled ourselves and I pushed out of the door, standing up in the refrigerated air, joints feeling lined with thick steel wire. I glanced back into the truck and saw Molly fast asleep in the back, paws twitching as she dreamed of clawing somebody to death, probably me.

John said, “It’s your first date and you make the girl camp out at the doughnut shop with you? You know they don’t open for three months, right?”

There were five guys standing around aside from John, though Tyler was the only one I knew. They had come in two tall delivery trucks with ANDERSON ROOF AND GUTTER painted on the side. I glanced at the strangers and said to John, “We, uh, had to leave the house. Shouldn’t you all be working?”

John said, “We had to get a load of shit from Home Depot. We’ve been fucking around for two hours. Passed by here and saw your truck. What happened at the house?”

Amy came around then, arms wrapped around that huge parka of hers and immediately pressed herself up against me.

“Hi, John. Ugh, I’m freezing.”

She reached back and pulled my arm around her, saying, “Warm me up.”

“Uh, I’ve got to have a word with John.” I grabbed her by the shoulders and sort of sat her aside, then motioned to John to follow me across the parking lot. We walked around the edge of the lot, me squinting as my eyes adjusted to the light. John said, “You look like shit.”

“I’m burning out, John. Seriously. I don’t know if I’m up for this. I feel stretched out, like too little butter scraped over too much waffle. And then it all falls down into one of the waffle holes and there’s none left for the rest of the waffle and you sort of have to tilt it to make it run out.”

“They got some serious weird shit going on at the Drain Rooter plant, Dave. Mall, too.”

This was when John told me the somewhat dubious story of his experience at the semi crash site and everything that followed. I saw his story and raised him our experience with the shadow people.

I looked back at my truck, where Amy was sitting sideways in the open door and fishing through her purse. She pulled out a brown pill bottle.

“Well there you go, Dave. It looks like the Drain Rooter plant is making more than drain cleaner. In fact, you could say they’re manufacturing evil.”

“No, we couldn’t say that.”

“I wanna see where that hole goes. I think that monster came out of it.”

“We can’t get into the place, John. There’s three shifts at the plant, working around the clock.”

We completed our circuit of the lot and arrived back where Tyler and one other guy leaned against the truck smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee from steaming insulated mugs.

John said, “There may be another way.”

John told me about the mall, and the ghost door that was there but wasn’t there. “Wanna know what I think? I think all those secret doors lead to the same place. Hell, there may be doors like that all over town. Like Wexler said.”

I nodded resignedly, sighed and said, “Well, we’re not waiting for them to just come get Amy again.”

“Absofuckinglutely. We’ll meet at noon.”

“What happens at noon?”

“We’re done with the roof job. They just want us to brace it for now and cover it. Keep the snow out.”

“You’re still going to fix their roof?”

“They paid Steve in advance. Plus, I really need the money.”

I noticed ghosts of exhaust rising from my Bronco; Amy had turned it on to get warm.

I said, “I don’t know what to do with her. That house of hers is eighteen different kinds of screwed.” I glanced at Tyler, saw he was listening intently, and lowered my voice. “She’s got people watching her through the TV, like me.”

Amy saw us and emerged from the truck at that moment, a twenty- four-ounce bottle of red Mountain Dew in her hand.

She came up and said, “Can I have this?”

“You keep that red shit in your truck now?” John asked me. “I think that’s one of the twelve warning signs, isn’t it?”

“I eat all of my meals there at work. If you eat in your car, nobody tries to talk to you.”

John looked at me with something like pity. I said, “It’s yours, Amy.”

She twisted at the cap, shoulders hunched against the cold. Somebody handed John a cup of coffee. John said, “Break time.”

“Shit yeah,” said Tyler, in his dickish way. He was wearing wraparound shades. He watched Amy as she tried to open the Mountain Dew bottle one- handed, trying to keep it still with her elbow. She concentrated on the task, grunting, the wet bottle sort of spinning in place.

I asked John, “Where’s the safest place to keep her while we do this?”

Amy said, “While you do what? Can I come?”

Tyler reacted to this for some reason, looking at John with a “when are people gonna learn” look, and then he spat on the ground. Tobacco spitting is a kind of nonverbal communication in many parts of the Midwest. He must have spilled his coffee a lot as a kid because he had one of those big spill- proof mugs, the kind that flare way out at the bottom. It looked like he was speaking into a megaphone every time he took a drink.

I said, “We’ll talk about it later.”

Amy dropped the bottle, made a frustrated sound like somebody stepping on a cat. I reached out as if to help her and she slapped at my hand, then went back to twisting at the cap.

I continued, “She can’t go back to that house. I don’t know if she has any money but we can work something out. She can sleep on my couch if it comes to that.”

John eyed me as if to say, “really?” but didn’t say anything.

Tyler got a sly look in his eyes and said, “I got an interestin’ story. My brother, he and his wife gave birth to a Down’s kid. He drools all over the place, he shits himself. They made my ma babysit a few times, and then some more times, and then it was every night. Every damned night. You know what happened then?”

“Your brain fell out?” I noticed Amy had stopped messing with the bottle and was sort of just looking at it, frozen. I said, “Look, I gotta—”

“Listen, man. Listen. They left the kid there. At Ma’s house. They come by to visit every now and then. My ma, she’s basically got stuck feedin’ and cleanin’ this thing now, every day, it’s her job. Full- time job. She can’t go to her bingo games or date or any of that shit because she’s got this thing to take care of, because she wanted to be a nice person. It’s like bein’ in prison.”

Amy glared at him, like she really had something killer to say to him, then she got this look on her face, sour, like biting an apple and seeing half a worm. She spun and took two steps toward my truck, then put her hand over her mouth and leaned over.

Tip: if you ever feel a puke coming on, do not, do not put your hand over your mouth to try to catch it. It’s reflex but it doesn’t work at all. Vomit kind of sprays everywhere. So Amy stood there in the snow, leaning over at the waist, her eyes clamped shut, her hand dripping, a puddle at her feet. It was an awkward moment. There were some comments from the crowd behind me. Somebody muttered something and somebody else chuckled.

I walked to her and said, “Over here.” I guided Amy toward the truck and sat her in the open door.

“Don’t move.”

I ran back to the rear door of the Bronco, opened it, reached in and grabbed a red- and- white flip- top cooler. This is my emergency kit. It contained a roll of duct tape, a spare pair of pants, an envelope with two hundred dollars, two bags of dried fruit, two packages of beef jerky, three bottles of water, a roll of those thick shop towels you see mechanics use, a small metal pipe—just right for cracking a skull with—and a fake beard. Look, you never know.

I pulled out a bottle of water and soaked a shop towel. I went to hand it to Amy, realized stupidly that she had no hand to take the towel with since she only had, you know, the puke hand and the nonexistent hand.

“Here,” I said. I took her arm by the wrist and wiped vomit from her fingers. Amy wrinkled her nose in disgust at this, but to be honest I had never attended a party of John’s where someone didn’t either vomit on me or near me. I was kind of inured to it.

As I worked I said, “When I was in seventh grade, I took Emily Parks to the Fall Festival. First time I had ever been anywhere with a girl. We wandered around and ate elephant ears and saltwater taffy and lemon shakeups, all of that festival stuff. We get on the Ferris wheel, and riiiiiight as the ride is about to end I lean over and puke in her lap. The ride slows to a stop, you know, so they can unload all of the riders. And we wind up at the very top. Waiting. She’s sitting up there, with a lap full of vomit, crying. And we’re up there for- ev- er.”

Amy’s hand seemed pretty clean. I tossed the soiled rag in the snow and gave her a new one and the bottle of water. I stepped back and said, “I didn’t ask another girl out until I was a junior in high school. Seventeen years old before I even held a girl’s hand. All because somewhere, in the back of my mind, I knew I would wind up puking on her.”

Amy didn’t react. She drank some water and wiped splatters of vomit off her pants and her shoes, her fingers having to be frozen now doing wet work in this weather. I caught a glimpse of her face and saw that look, a familiar look, a sort of embarrassment that is almost numbing. Like she wanted to dig a hole, bury herself in it and let grass grow over the top.

A warmth spread behind my eyes. Everything turned red in my brain, my skull suddenly filled with Tabasco sauce. There was a tingling in my gut, muscles tensing. I picked up the used towels and walked back toward a trash can in the parking lot, near where Tyler and the guys were standing. I tossed in the towels and Tyler leaned over, whispering, “You’re a nice guy, Dave. So all I’m sayin’ is watch, that’s all I’m sayin’. Watch out bein’ a nice guy because you can get fucked.”

A blink. A searing pain in my hand. Blood.

There were arms on me, grabbing my jacket, pulling me, and there was blood on my knuckles and blood in my mouth. My jaws were clenched, I had bitten my tongue and tasted warm copper. Tyler was on his hands and knees, blood dripping from his nose and mouth, grunting that they had better hold me back because I was a fucking psycho and that I had broken his fucking nose. Then John was there, in my face, saying okay, okay, back off, just go, get outta here. I looked down at my throbbing hands and saw the knuckles were split, like I had been punching concrete. John pushed me back from the group, looked over my shoulder and said, “Get him outta here.”

A fat blond kid was standing over Tyler, looked like a bloated version of him and I realized this was Tyler’s brother or cousin or something. And the fat kid was saying see, see what happens when you run your fucking mouth, Tyler, that one day talking shit was gonna get him killed because he was gonna say the wrong thing and some nigger was gonna shoot him in the back. John turned and joined the group, and I was standing there in the parking lot by myself, lost, disoriented. Tyler outweighed me by seventy- five pounds and, where I spent my days shelving DVDs, he spent his days carrying roofs up ladders. But the strangest thing, the sickening thing, was the urge that flashed through my mind as I was standing over him—

—the urge to BITE—

—and I knew this was it again, that I had lost time, that I had lost myself. Then I felt a pull on my jacket and the unique sensation of a handless arm reaching around my midsection.

“Come on. Come on, David.”

Amy circled around, her hand on my sleeve.

“Amy, I—”

“Come on. It’s okay. Come on.”

She started turning me back toward the truck and I felt everyone staring. She got behind me and started pushing me toward the Bronco.

“Come on, David. Take deep breaths. You’re fine.”

“Amy, don’t—”

“Nope. Come on. Keep going. Vrrrooooommmm . . .”

That last part was Amy making an engine sound as she steered me toward the truck, like she was driving me. She reached around me and opened the door, then pushed me into the seat like you see cops doing with handcuffed suspects. She slammed the door, circled around and sat in beside me. We sat that way for a moment; I glanced out my window and saw the whole group watching. I reached up with a shaking hand to twist the key and realized the engine was already running. I tried to slow my breathing. I couldn’t keep my hands still.

Amy asked, “Are you okay?”

“Just, give me a second.”

“You kicked that guy’s ass.”

“Amy . . .”

“Come on, let’s go. Before he gets up and beats the crap out of you.”

WE GOT BACK to my house to find it ransacked. It was difficult to tell because I’m not the world’s greatest house keeper myself, but by the time I was in the kitchen I knew they had been here: I don’t normally keep the oven open. I whipped out the gun and prowled around the house, finding it empty. Amy asked what they were looking for. I dodged the question by pointing out what a pity it was they tossed the place because it was immaculate before they got here and that it was too bad she didn’t get to see it when it was clean. I went to the kitchen and ran water over my bleeding knuckles.

“Look,” Amy said, from behind me. “They threw laundry all over your floor in there.”

“Yeah. And they wore the clothes first, the bastards.”

“And what were they looking for again?”

A pause. I was on the verge of revealing what was probably our biggest and most dangerous secret to someone whom I had known for all of a day. I let out a breath and looked right into her eyes. The irises were too green, that was the thing. Like grass after a week of spring rain. And there was a piercing, electric intelligence in those eyes that I was too stupid to notice before. Seeing right through me. And I suddenly had the very dismaying realization that I probably could not lie to this girl, for one very simple reason. She was smarter than me.

I said, “They were looking for the soy sauce. I know they didn’t find it, though.”

“The what?”

I didn’t answer. I did a walk around the house, saw if anything was broken. It looked like they had taken the batteries out of my clock for some reason, and the glass fixture on my ceiling fan was cracked.

Amy followed me around, pestering me with questions, suddenly desperately curious. The truth was, I wasn’t sure how to explain it. After about the fifth time she turned the conversation to it, I held up a silencing hand, made a shushing sound, and put a single finger to her lips.

“All will become apparent in good time, sweet Amy.”

For a second, I seriously thought she was going to punch me. I went outside and did a walk- around of the house, glancing nervously at the toolshed and praying that the door wouldn’t be standing open.

What are you talking about, dipshit? If they came and took the body off your hands that’d be a blessing.

I noticed the flag was up on my mailbox. This was Sunday. I went over and opened it, found a palm- sized package inside. There was no name, no address, no postage. I stared at it with some trepidation, then peeled it open, thinking it might be the world’s tiniest mail bomb. Inside was a necklace, a little gold cross on a delicate chain. I had seen it before, though seeing it close I noticed that the cross was formed of two tiny nails, bound together by thread-like wire. There was a piece of paper inside, too, a folded piece of stationery bearing a cartoon puppy with a pencil in his mouth. The writing was in sparkly pink:Hi! I had a dream

& an angel told me to

give this to you!

It’s always brought me

luck!!

God Bless!

(Smiley face)

—Krissy Lovelace

All of the I’s were dotted with big, friendly loops. Everybody wants to help.

When I went in, Amy was in the bathroom running water. She emerged, stuffing Altoids mints into her mouth from a tin. I went to the fridge and said, “You want something to drink? I have, uh, some fruity Leinenkugel’s beer and, uh, some kind of terrible plum- flavored liquor John’s friend from the Czech Republic sent him. It tastes like the juice from a single plum was squeezed into a fifty-five-gallon drum of paint thinner.”

The cans of Leinenkugel’s had masking tape on them with JOHN’S printed in ink. Amy looked around me and said, “John is protective about his beer, isn’t he?”

“I put that label on there. When company comes I want them to know the Leinie’s is his, not mine. Do you want it?”

“Uh, no. I don’t drink,” she said, shaking her head and brushing the hair from her eyes for the four hundredth time since yesterday. “I mean, I drink liquids. Not alcohol. I couldn’t mix it with the pain pills. So who do we tell about the monsters?”

“Uh, what?”

“All this, everything we saw. Who do we talk to about this sort of thing?”

“I think the government has an eight hundred number but you just get one of those automated answering things. No. John and I are going to, uh, look into it. Today. Before they have a chance to come for you again.”

I closed the refrigerator and faced her, then told her an abbreviated and less retarded version of John’s story about the Drain Rooter site and the Mall of the Dead.

She said, “Why don’t we just go? To another town, or state, or Canada. When’s the last time you’ve heard of somebody exploding in Canada?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

Because we’re under the eye, Amy.

“There are things you still don’t know. The shadow people . . . they’ve spoken to me. They know my name. It’s . . . personal somehow. With them. I think trying to get away from that by leaving—even climbing into a rocket ship and leaving the fuckin’ planet—would be laughable. To them it’d be like watching a hamster trying to escape by running on his little wheel really fast. I picture the rest of my life, running scared, forever. No. I can’t. I won’t. We’re gonna go in there, where they live. And we’re gonna go armed.”

“I wanna go.”

“Amy—”

“No, don’t even try. I want to see. I have a right to.”

“Amy, we’re going into that place with the intention of leaving it as a smoking hole in the ground.”

Praise be to Allah!

“I know.”

“No, you think this is cool, I can see it in your eyes. It’s not cool. We do not have this thing under control. Let me tell you a story. When I was little we had our sewer line back up. Toilet overflowing and all that. So they had to come and root it out, and what they pulled out of the sewer line was a woodchuck. There was a break in the pipe somewhere, two joints that had pulled apart, and this thing had gotten in. Okay? I mean to a woodchuck, this had to be the adventure of a lifetime. Hidden tunnel, seeming to go on for miles. So he’s crawling and exploring and waiting to see the hidden treasure at the end. And then, he gets drowned. In our poo.”

Amy nodded and said, “Well, that’s sad.”

“The saddest. John and I, we’re the woodchuck. See, I can read it on you, that you think you’re really a part of something now, that we’re gonna do something really great today and change the world. Well Amy, understand what I’m about to say. There’s something terribly wrong with us. John and me. Amy, there are days when I’m sure—sure—that I’m stone- cold raving batshit insane. That none of this is happening, that I’m raving about it from a padded room somewhere. And do you know how I respond to that, to that knowledge that I may be delusional and dangerous? I arm myself. With a gun.”

“David, you’re not—”

“Listen. The only reason I’m standing up to these guys now is because I’m in a corner. I don’t have a choice. You do. And if you make the wrong choice, there is an excellent chance that these are your last hours on Earth. All the things you wanted to do with your life, they may not happen. All the things you like to do, all the things you thought you might like to do in the future, all gone. And it’ll be because of me. Because I led you into my turd pipe.”

She said, “Why do you, like, hate yourself?”

“If I knew me as somebody else, I would hate me just as much. Why have a double standard?”

“Well, that’s just stupid.”

I rubbed my eyes and sighed. I reached into my front pocket and pulled out the necklace and held it up.

“Here. It’s good luck. Or something.”

I went to Amy and reached around her neck, clasping the thin chain under her hair.

I glanced out of the window, saw the snow was coming down again.

Facing her, I said, “You deserved some kind of normal life, Amy. I can picture you, in college, a family back home. Maybe you’re working part-time at a music store. Geeky guys coming in and flirting with you at the counter. And I could come in and make some kind of awkward conversation with you and you could keep making excuses not to go out with me and I would just keep coming back and back and then you would get a restraining order against me, and my dad would get it overturned. Finally you would agree and we could go to a picnic or bowling or whatever normal people do when they’re together. What do normal people do when they’re together?”

“I have no idea.”

It’s funny, pretending that it’s normal to have a conversation with somebody standing three inches away.

She leaned in and—

IT LOOKED LIKE the world outside my window had lost its signal and gone to static. Snowing like hell, wind whipping it around. I leaned against my window, feeling the cold glass against my forehead, breaths fogging up a circular patch under my nose. There was a time when I would have found the idea of certain death a little comforting, like being on the last day of a job I hated. A weight lifted. Now, feeling the cold glass on my face and wet hair cooling my scalp and my mouth tasting vaguely like secondhand Altoids and knowing I would never see snow again, I felt a little like crying. But just a little.

I saw the grille of a car emerge like a ghost, headlights faint in the whiteout. The big car swung into my driveway, John’s Caddie. Through the window I watched as John ducked out, wearing an Army- issue fatigue jacket. He circled around to his trunk, popped it and pulled out a canvas backpack. He slung it over his shoulder and then pulled out a large tool that was unmistakably a—

“Is that a medieval battle- ax?” Amy asked from behind me, rubbing a towel through her hair.

“With John, we’ll be fortunate if it turns out to be nothing stupider than that.”

The ax was a leftover from high school, when we used to be big into Dungeons and Dragons. I mean, um, bear hunting. John burst in the door at that moment, dusted with snow, shouting, “We are gonna fuck that place up.”

He tossed down his load with a force that shook the floor, then bent over and hefted the ax that I believe was one of several props he stole from that medieval-themed restaurant he worked at for a while. He paused to let his eyes flick to mine and Amy’s wet hair and presumably asked himself if our showers had overlapped in any way. He was too polite to ask.

Then he turned and stepped past me into the hallway. He studied the wall, then raised the ax and swung it into the wall with a THOCK that sent plaster dust flying.

He swung three more times, then thrust his hand into the hole he had created and pulled out a small object that fit in the palm of his hand. He glanced at it, wiped the dust on his shirt, then tossed it to me. I caught the small canister. Silver, the size of a pill bottle.

Amy saw it and asked, “What’s that?”

“You’ve never seen it before?”

“Why would I?”

“Big Jim had it at one time. We don’t know where he got it though.”

I quickly relayed to her the story of the weather guy and the mall and how we came across the container.

“So,” she said. “What’s in it?”

CHAPTER 15

D-Day

“VERY SIMPLY,” I said to Amy, “the reason we can see things that you can’t is right there in that bottle. We don’t know where it came from or what exactly it does. But in those first hours after you take it, your brain is tuned in like nothing you can imagine. Eyes like the Hubble telescope, sensing light that’s not even on the spectrum. You might be able to read minds, make time stop, cook pasta that’s exactly right every time. And you can see the shadowy things that share this world, the ones who are always present and always hidden. It’d be like if a doctor could walk around with microscopes strapped to his eyes all of the time, so he could just look and see the sickness crawling around inside us.”

Amy pointed out, “Well, he’d still have to be able to see inside your blood vessels and lungs and all that. A microscope wouldn’t—”

“These microscopes also have some kind of X-ray vision attachment.”

She reached out and picked up the canister.

“Ugh. It’s cold.”

“The container is always cold,” I said. “It refrigerates the contents twenty- four hours a day. And we don’t know how. No batteries, no energy source. And it’s been working for years. The sauce, it has to be kept cool or it becomes, uh, unstable.”

Unstable, in the way that a swarm of killer bees is “unstable.”

“And you’re going to take it again?”

“I don’t want to. But I think we have to. It’ll level the playing field, get us on the same frequency as the bad guys. It’s the reason we’re alive.”

Oh, and everybody else who has ever tried it has wound up dead. The irony.

I said, “When I ran across this bottle, it was empty, just like mine.”

I opened the bottle and shook out the contents. Two capsules, black as licorice.

“I bet you’re wondering where these two came from. We’re always wondering the same thing. The stuff seems to show up when it wants to.”

She said, “You’re not going to let me take any, are you?”

“I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. But you’re not supposed to take it. If you were, there would be three capsules in here.”

John said, “We better swallow these before they attack us.”

We did. We waited.

“Sooooo . . .” Amy asked, “how do you know when it’s working?”

I said, “You just, uh, start noticing things. It’s hard to explain. Like bits of radio signal coming in through the static.”

With that, a thought passed through my head, a flash like a shooting star. Pro wrestling was real. But not real in the sense that we perceive reality. It was more real than reality. Then, I worked out pi to four thousand decimal places and realized that if anyone ever drew a truly perfect circle it would actually look like a straight line to our eyes. I looked at the silver pill canister and realized it was more than four thousand years old. Or less than four seconds.

I said to John, “You know that if you walked around the world, your hat would travel thirty- one feet farther than your shoes?”

John said, “I dunno, Dave, but before we make a bomb I have to shave half the dog.”

I nodded. He got up, called to Molly and herded her into my bathroom. I wondered when the soy sauce would take effect.

To kill some time, I got up and hunted around the closet in my laundry room until I found my squirt gun. This was one of those huge modern guns, green and with a logo that said BIG GUSHER on the side. It had a separate two- gallon tank with hooks for a belt. The commercials bragged it could spray a soaking, quarter-inch- wide stream of water for fifty feet and that was pretty much true. The gun was sticky from when John filled it with beer last summer.

I hunted around until I found a roll of duct tape and an extended disposable lighter, the kind people light grills with. I gathered three bottles of flammable chemicals that I would mix to form the fuel. I took my armload of items and dumped them on the table.

Amy said, “So, you’re making a flamethrower?”

“Amy, we gotta be prepared. We don’t know what we’ll find in that place, but for all we know it could be the Devil himself.”

“David, what possible good is that thing gonna do?”

“Oh, no, you didn’t hear me. I said it’s a flamethrower.” Girls.

“But if something is from Hell why would you use a—”

Amy stopped, apparently deciding against pursuing that question and instead asked, “What am I taking? When we go? Is there a weapon or something for me?”

“Have you forgotten the woodchuck already?”

I went to work on the squirt gun. The sound of rustling and growling emerged from the bathroom. Under that I could detect the low hum of my beard trimmer.

Amy put her hand on mine, her other hand balled up in a fist on the table.

“There was a sheep,” she said. “In Scotland, I think. And this sheep escaped from the ranch. And you know they shear sheep for their wool. Well, this thing stayed gone for seven years. Finally they found it, in a cave. And there was nobody to shear the sheep, so when they found it, its wool was gigantic. It was, like, a walking afro. And it wound up back on the ranch, just another sheep, but for the rest of its life it knew that for a while, it was free. It had that and nobody could take it away. Do you understand? I’m like you; I want to face this thing. Whatever it is. We’re like that sheep, taking our shot. If for no other reason than just to say we did.”

“I do understand. Trust me, I do. And it takes a special kind of person to make up something so utterly bullshitty. You know their wool doesn’t just keep growing like that.”

“That’s not even the point, David.”

I went to take her other hand, saw my hand disappear into hers and realized that it was because she didn’t have another hand. But there it was, thin fingers wrapped in a tight ball.

She looked down, curious, not sure what I was staring at. I said, “I think the sauce is working. Go put on the Scooby glasses. I want to try something.”

She got up, found them on the counter, then sat down and I gestured to look at the spot where her hand shouldn’t be.

“Now this time, really concentrate. I don’t know if—”

No point in finishing the sentence. Her jaw hung open.

“Oh! I can see it! How is that possible?”

She tried it with and without the glasses, saw the hand appear and disappear. “Look! My fingernails! I had let them get long and I was meaning to cut them before I went in for the surgery. No wonder it hurts . . .”

Then she lifted the clenched fist off the table and, very slowly, uncurled the fingers. She laid the hand flat on the table.

“David. This is crazy.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s about the least crazy thing you’re gonna see today.”

The bathroom door burst open, and Molly came trotting out. The left half of her body had been shaved almost down to the skin. The right half was as shaggy as before. John emerged after her, brushing a layer of dog hair off his clothes.

John said, “Well, that’s done.”

Before I could stop her, Amy asked, “Why did you—”

“It was Molly’s idea. She wants to look like two different dogs when she’s coming and going. She thinks it will make it easier for her to steal food.”

He turned to me.

“That’s one complicated dog, Dave. Have you started on the bomb?”

“The what?”

SOCIETY IS DOOMED for one very simple reason: it takes dozens of men working months with millions of dollars in materials to build a building, but only one dumb-ass with a bomb to bring it down. John and I had scavenged the house for bomb- making materials. Neither of us knew how to make a bomb prior to today, but we improvised one by analyzing the molecular makeup of the ingredients. My head was taking on a fiery soreness, cooking like an engine run too long and too hard. I wondered, not for the first time, if using the soy sauce would shave years off my life and I realized that it probably didn’t matter.

So, using a packet of Jell- O and the innards of two smoke detectors and a pack of shredded playing cards and the refrigerant from my truck’s air conditioner and nine other ingredients, we fashioned a sticky explosive clay, mint green in color. We poured it into a tinfoil mold we made in the shape of a dog bone and stuck it in the freezer to solidify. The idea was to disguise it as something that would seem normal being in a dog owner’s front pocket, should we get caught and searched.

I sat at the kitchen table, snapping brass bullets into the one spare magazine I had bought for the Smith.

“Here’s what I think,” said John. “That facility, they’ve got to have some kind of intercom system. We sneak our way to the office where the mic is, and put the boom box in front of it. We go right for the fucking jugular: ‘November Rain,’ on a loop. While they’re all holdin’ their ears and begging for forgiveness, we go find this Korrok fucker and shove this bomb right up his ass. Or get him to eat it, if it turns out he’s a huge dog.”

I nodded and stood. The real plan, the unspoken one that hid between John’s words, was that we would die. But, we would die in the middle of what Korrok’s people would remember as the single most retarded and baffling incident in their history. We would be their Guy Fawkes. They would create a holiday about us. If we were going to wind up in the belly of Korrok, might as well see if we could make him choke on the way down.

Me and John, I mean. Not Amy.

I let out a long breath and put on my coat. I dropped in the gun and the spare magazine. John threw on his Army jacket and leaned over, unzipped the backpack and pulled out a chainsaw. He had tied a length of bungee strap to it so he could carry it slung over his shoulder. He then picked up the homemade flamethrower, not questioning for a moment what it was or what it did. He flicked on the lighter and a delicate tongue of flame licked out in front of the barrel. He nodded in approval and blew it out, then grabbed the battle- ax off the floor and handed it to Amy. She managed to hold it aloft in her one hand for exactly two seconds before she let the head clang to the floor. She let go of the handle, then dug some Chap-Stick from her jacket and smeared it on her lips.

We were loading up the Bronco when John reminded me of the exploding dog bone. I ran inside, pulled it out of the aluminum- foil mold and walked into the yard with it in my hand.

I probably should have seen this next part coming. Molly ran over, half shaved and half shaggy, and snatched the bone from my fingers.

At John’s request I’ll skip over this next part, which involved us chasing the dog around the yard for a very long time and finally John tackling her, prying open her jaws and finding no remnant of exploding bone in there.

I began to walk away from the situation in disgust when a snow- covered John, still on the ground with Molly, said, “Look!”

He was holding up Molly’s front paw. I saw nothing unusual about it, but then realized the pi- like symbol we had seen on the carcass of exploded Molly was missing from this dog’s paw. Molly licked her nose and sneezed. John stood up; Molly flipped onto her feet and trotted away.

I said, “What do you think it means?”

“Hell, I don’t know. We need the bone bomb back. Take the chainsaw and cut open the dog.”

Amy objected to this and came up with what I thought was a far more disgusting plan of trying to flush the bone from the other end of Molly. She went inside and dug out two convenience- store burritos from my freezer and heated them in the microwave until they were lukewarm.

After feeding both burritos to Molly and seeing no immediate results, John said, “All right, let’s go. We’re gonna be late for our certain death.”

WHITEOUT. THERE WAS more snow than air in the atmosphere. We went fifteen miles an hour through town, the whole place shut down under the storm. It was, I thought, an actual blizzard. I had never seen one. About halfway there, John squinted into his rearview mirror.

“What the hell?”

Red- and- blue lights swept across the frosted rear window. We all glanced at each other, figuring we could either pull over or plow through the snowstorm for the slowest police chase since O.J. I pulled over, two tires ramping up onto mounds of roadside snow. A blue, bear- like figure strode up to the driver’s-side door. I rolled down the window and felt freezing bits of snow land on my cheek. A face leaned down. I saw it and felt myself tense, my hand going right to the butt of the Smith.

Oh, crap.

It was Drake. But it was not Drake. His wide face sat there inches from mine, an inhuman blankness in the expression, like that of an embalmed body at a funeral. His eyes were pure black, no whites, no irises. I blinked, and his eyes looked human again. Human, but as lifeless as a doll’s.

Drake’s mouth said, “OUT.” He flung the word at me like a punch. I smelled a puff of breath that was chemically sweet, like a little kid after drinking too much Kool- Aid. Drake yanked open the door and grabbed my jacket, pulling me out. He clamped on my shoulders and spun me around and pushed me toward the truck. I heard the other door open and there was John, standing there, looking at Drake and knowing what I knew. Drake was gone.

The big cop pulled out a baton from a loop in his belt and smacked his palm with it.

“SO,” he said, barking the sound so that it was barely an English word. “So. Big smart guy. Big guy. Dolls and jellyfish and the night comes to life and walks on Mulholland Drive.”

He smacked his palm. His pudgy lips spread to reveal a shark’s grin. I wanted to grab for my gun but a swing with that club could break the bones in my wrist in half a second. I don’t know if I was poised to make my move or frozen in panic. At any second, the Drake thing could end this little adventure before it got started. I glanced at John, hoping he had some kind of plan. The look in his eyes said he was hoping the same from me. I looked back at Drake’s squad car and saw he hadn’t come alone. Riding with him was a muscular black cop who was climbing out of the passenger side of the car now, snow landing on his hat, grinning the grin of the freshly mad.

Drake stepped around to the grille of my truck. He said, “MULHOLLAND DRIVE! SMART GUY! THE BLUE BOX! THE BLUE KEY! THE BLUE EYE!” He swung the stick and a headlight exploded with a crash. Drake smiled again, then bent his knees and leapt six feet into the air. He landed on my hood with a thud that rocked the whole truck on its suspension. I saw Amy jump in the backseat, eyes bouncing back and forth between me and John. Molly barked, but made no other effort to help.

Drake looked down at me from his perch on my hood. He stuck the end of the baton into his pocket, unzipped his pants, and began pissing on my windshield. Urine splattered and yellowed the pile of snow bunched along my windshield wipers.

“HA! KORROK WAITS IN THE ALLEY, SMART GUY!”

Drake’s partner was disrobing. The black cop was flinging clothing into the road, mumbling to himself. He finally yanked off a pair of boxers, put his hands on his naked hips and screamed something like “tubesteak” over and over again to the snowy sky.

Drake finished his pee, zipped up. He lifted one shoe, reached down and pulled it off. He peeled off his sock and raised the foot toward me.

He stood that way for a long moment, foot raised like a photo of a field- goal kicker caught in midkick. I glanced back and saw the other cop was packing handfuls of snow onto his groin.

I looked back at Drake and finally I saw what he was showing me. On his big toe was a tiny tattoo. The pi symbol, just like the old Molly had.

“THIS IS JUST A RECORDING, SMART GUY!”

He lowered his foot and pulled out his baton again. He held it up and pointed at me with his other hand.

“NOW BEND OVER! BEND OVER AND DROP YOUR PANTS, SMART GUY!”

Simultaneously, John and I ducked back inside the Bronco. I threw it into gear and slammed on the gas, Drake still standing on the hood.

The truck lurched forward and we barreled down the road, but Drake stayed planted, crouching like an oversized hood ornament. He bellowed at me over the wind, flinging aside his hat and tossing his hair.

“WHERE YOU GOING? HA HA HA! LET’S GO INTO THE ALLEY! HE’S WAITING, SMART GUY!”

He reared back with the baton, as if ready to smash the windshield. I slammed on the brakes, the truck spun out, Drake went flying.

He vanished behind the miniature mountain range of piled snow along the road. I heard a faint scream that twisted into a howl, a high- pitched sound that human vocal cords couldn’t duplicate. I considered going to help him. The urge quickly passed. I threw the truck in reverse, stepped on the gas, threw it into gear and fishtailed down the road. I peered into my mirrors, looked nervously for him or his naked snow- crotched partner. Their car was nowhere to be seen. Molly stood and stared out the back window, shuddering and issuing a low, rumbling growl.

Amy was asking something, asking what was wrong with him, was he dead, should we go back. Neither I nor John answered. I just drove. Gotta push on, don’t even look back.

Something moved in my rearview mirror, a dark shape against the snow. I looked, thought I saw something, something moving fast. Not a person. Or maybe I didn’t see it.

WE FOUND THE inlet road in the snow, turned in and crept through the mall parking lot. We watched for other parked vehicles, saw none. Our light was fading fast.

We filed out and loaded up and marched across the lot, Molly in the lead, our heads on swivels. Visibility didn’t even extend to the edge of the parking lot, where a white curtain of snow hid the rest of the world. I had the gun in my hand, didn’t even remember pulling it out. A snowflake flew right up my nose. Just before we reached the door I saw John spin around, like he had seen something in the swirling mass of white. I squinted, could see nothing, and we both dismissed it as adrenaline. We should have known better.

We filed inside, using the same entrance John had used earlier that morning. Snow was pouring in through the skylight now, piling an inch high on the floor, drafts of chilled air flowing down from the gap. Once inside and out of the wind, John flicked the lighter that served as the pilot light for the toy flamethrower.

John said, “Drake’s foot. What was the deal with that? I thought he was trying to kick your head and he just missed.”

“He had that symbol, the little pi. Like Molly.”

“What do you think, it’s like a mark of some kind?”

“Of what?”

“Evil?”

Amy asked, “Wouldn’t it make it harder to do evil if they had to carry around a mark?”

John shrugged. “Once they’re barefoot and kicking you, it’s already too late. Follow me.”

We went into the maintenance room. To John and me, the big, decorative doorway stood in the center of the wall to our right, plain as day and as out of place as the face on Mars. Amy saw only a wall. Until, of course, she tried viewing it through the Scooby glasses. I let the little maintenance door close behind me. John looked at Amy and nodded his head toward the other door and said, “Ghost door.”

I said, “Please don’t call it that.”

Molly trotted past me and went right to the door and sniffed at it. Interesting. John said, “I feel like we should look for a save point.”

I saw a long, curved handle on the door. I let out a long breath and raised the gun. John raised the fire gusher. I reached out for the handle and watched as my hand passed right through.

“Shit,” said John. “It’s a ghost knob.”

I sighed and looked at John, was about to suggest heading back home and curling up in front of the fireplace. But then Amy stepped forward, the wet and wrinkled cardboard glasses askew on her face.

She reached out with her left arm, the arm that, in reality, didn’t have a hand. But with the hand that I could see, the ghost of a hand that was no longer there, she reached out and grabbed the door handle that was also not really there. The handle turned.

With a rumbling not unlike the sound in your head when you crunch ice, a vertical slit formed in the wall and then tore open, widening. John and I both crouched into a fighting stance and I felt my bladder loosen a little. The wall melted and peeled back like a curtain until there was a door- sized opening before us with a bunched seam around the edge, rolls of plaster and jutting splinters of wood. Beyond it was a tiny, round room that I somehow sensed was an elevator.

John stepped through the door and looked to his right. He pointed out a number on the wall, in black, that said “10.” After a few seconds, it switched to “9.”

I felt Molly brush past my legs and trot into the open doorway. I turned, put my hands on Amy’s shoulders.

“Go.”

“What? No.”

“You’ve got money, from the insurance? When your parents—”

“Yeah, so—”

“Wait for us, wait someplace light. Give us an hour. Then if we’re not back take my truck and—”

“David, I can’t even drive.”

I dug in my pocket and pressed my cell phone into her hand.

“Then call a cab. I’m dead serious. If we’re not back in an hour, fly. Take the cab straight to the airport and fly away, get on a plane, go to Alaska. Stay far away from this place forever and ever and forget you ever knew me.”

“Alaska? Why—”

“Because it’s always daytime there.”

“No it’s not!”

“Actually, Dave,” John said from behind me, “I think it’s always nighttime there.”

“It doesn’t matter,” squealed Amy, “because I’m not going anyw—”

“Amy, please. This is insane. When that door opened the only thought that went through my mind was that I would be damned for letting you die at the hands of whatever came through it. We’ve gone this far and you’re still okay and I want to do this one good thing while I’ve got the chance. For no other reason than because when I die—and I’m pretty damned sure now that I will within the hour—I want to be able to say I did this one last thing, this one unselfish thing before I went.”

I pulled the Smith & Wesson from my pocket and went to put it in her other hand, realized she didn’t have another hand, then shoved it into her coat pocket instead. Amy started to say something, but was interrupted when the metal door exploded.

The little maintenance door flew across the room and bounced off the opposite wall. We all ducked, and in a cloud of dust I saw something the size of a man but shaped all wrong, backward joints jutting into the air, a tiny brainless head, skin of notched alligator hide. There was a second of brain paralysis when I couldn’t register what I was seeing. But I had seen the thing before, in Jim’s basement. Only this one was moving, crouching low like a predator, turning to look at us.

Amy was on her knees and had opened her mouth to say something, but before she could, a column of flame poured past her face.

“DOWN!” screamed John, about a half second later than I would have preferred. Orange fire licked the creature and the floor and the wall behind it. I thought I smelled my own hair burning. The beast writhed and thrashed about, but apparently its skin wasn’t that flammable because when John let off there were only small tongues of flame licking at its shoulders.

It looked pissed.

John worked the shotgun- like pump on the squirt gun to build up the pressure and fire again. I flung my body aside and plunged my hand into my pocket to get the Smith—then remembered I had given it to Amy ten seconds ago. I pulled out my car keys instead and flung them at the beast; they bounced off its chest with a jingle.

The monster advanced on me, racing past Amy with quick, blurry little steps, moving like it was on fast- forward. I tried to stand but suddenly there were claws around my neck, and a second after that I was flying. A wall pounded my back and suddenly I was in the little round elevator looking up at John; the beast had thrown me like a child’s toy. I scrambled to my feet and this thing was on me again, filling the doorway, blocking us into the little round room. Molly was standing there next to me, sniffing at the monster’s foot and deciding it would be unpleasant to eat.

John was screaming something but then this thing had its claws in my shoulder, pain spilling down the whole side of my body. I leaned my head around the beast and screamed, “AAAAAMMMMMYYYYYY!!!!!! RUUUUUUUNNNNNN!!!!!!”

She stood there behind the beast, petrified for a long moment. The beast was doing something with its other hand, rearing back, probably half a second from ripping my face off. I felt John’s hands clumsily prying at the monster’s claws, trying to get them off me. The beast’s face was two inches from mine, its little eyes twitching, and I could smell the thing and it smelled like Old Spice somehow. From the corner of my eye I saw that the number on the wall said, “2.”

Amy turned to go and suddenly I had a new mission, to keep the beast here, to make it take as long as possible to eat us.

A second beast appeared.

In the ruins of the maintenance doorway, another monster just like this one. As it advanced on Amy I had the crazy thought that the thing had clumps of snow stuck to its crotch.

The number on the wall vanished. The ghost door closed.

Everything stopped. The wall had melted back into place as if it had always been as solid as a, uh, wall.

Suddenly I was looking at the head and shoulders and claws of the monster emerging from the solid wall, as if it were a mounted hunter’s trophy. The ghost door had closed right on the bastard, half on this side and half on the other. After a second, the severed chunks clumped to the floor, leaving red stains behind on the wall. The clawed hand was still embedded in my shoulder, the severed arm hanging off and dripping red on the floor.

John muttered, “What the—I wonder how many employees they lose that way?”

“Amy!!” I screamed into the wall, tearing off the shorn limb and flinging it to the ground with disgust. The claws were still twitching on their own when it landed. Molly was at my feet, barking, yelping. I heard nothing from the other side. I pounded the wall with my palms, then felt the surface sliding under my fingers.

“AMY!!! AAAAMMMMYYYYY!!!”

I punched the wall and thought I broke my hand. I felt motion and knew that we were moving upward, which was impossible because the mall did not have a second floor. I cursed again, put my hands on my knees, realized that every life that touched mine ended in utter horror.

Molly whimpered at my feet. John said something, something about reaching the top and being ready and I got the idea. I stood upright and took the chainsaw from John, trembling all over. I looked over the chainsaw, figuring out how to work it. Could I have gotten caught in this situation with a dumber weapon?

I glanced around and realized the boom box hadn’t made it into the elevator. Man, did any of it matter at this point?

Up and up and up we went. Was the elevator climbing in midair? John held the fire gusher at the ready. He was saying something about how there was nothing we could do and we just had to get in and out fast enough and that we had all the more reason to survive and blah, blah, blah. What ever.

The trip up took twenty damned minutes. Hundreds of feet. Finally we jolted to a stop and an opening appeared in the wall. We were looking at a long corridor, rounded at the top and made seemingly of smooth stone, like marble or polished granite. It was lit with fluorescent lights and decorated with warning signs about contamination and ID badges.

I wrapped my fingers tight around the plastic handle of the chainsaw and stepped into the hall, Molly following a step behind. We went maybe the length of four or five city blocks, John with the little pi lot flame dancing at the end of his flamethrowing toy, me wondering how much noise the chainsaw would make when I pulled the rope thing. Or if it even had gas in it.

We reached a door. Just a regular metal door with a knob. We readied ourselves. John flung it open and we ducked inside.

The floor turned into a metal grate and we realized we had emerged onto a catwalk. I looked over the rail and saw we were suspended over an expanse the size of an airplane hangar, but dimly lit. The floor was populated with people in white, bustling around like a marketplace, swarming around tables and equipment. It was noisy as hell. Machines and grinding and rustling of feet, people working in the dark.

We took a few steps forward and realized we weren’t alone. A man, wearing a white jumpsuit with a hood and a glass faceplate that reminded me of the contamination-free “clean suits” you see people wearing in labs, stood on the catwalk about ten feet away. He had a Subway sandwich bag in one gloved hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other. He stared at us for a long moment, eyes bouncing from Molly to my chainsaw to the finger of flame dancing from a tool that the man probably couldn’t help but think was a flame throwing squirt gun.

John said, “We’re from the fire department.”

The man spun on his heels and sprinted the other direction, feet clanging on the grated metal floor. We gave chase. He passed through a doorway. We followed and found ourselves on a spiral stairwell going down, John shouting at the man all the way, asking to see his flammability permit.

The man hit bottom and threw himself out of another doorway. We followed and found ourselves at ground level on the factory floor, or what ever it was, surrounded by people in white jumpsuits who were doing an excellent job of ignoring us. These men did not wear the face masks and seemed, to a man, to be completely bald.

Dark, dark, dark. Little red lights here and there on pieces of machinery that I couldn’t identify, but no overhead lights and no lamps and nothing but little glowing patches that cast upside-down shadows. The man we were chasing disappeared into the crowded darkness and we didn’t follow.

To my left were blue plastic barrels, rows and rows of them, hundreds. At the edge were two without lids, full of a deep crimson fluid that indeed looked like transmission fluid. Two men were standing over one of the open barrels, dipping into it and collecting samples in vials. One of the men turned to face me, and I saw that he did not have a face.

Or, I should say he had half a face. The forehead curled down over where the eyes should be, joining the cheeks. The nostrils were wide and flat, African. He had a thin, lipless mouth and huge ears. The guy next to him was the same. The four guys down the row as well. Those guys were hefting huge translucent plastic bags, vacuum-packed and shrunk around what looked like sides of beef.

I gawked around like a little tourist kid. Along my left were long glass tanks as tall as houses, something you’d see at a city aquarium. The liquid inside was a cloudy pink. Floating inside were pale blurred shapes that might have been people and other things, smaller lumps that held the shape of small animals, dogs and things like squirrels. I walked down the row, dazed. I blinked, trying desperately to adjust to the semidarkness, trying to take everything in. I had the crazy thought that no wonder they didn’t pay to light the place. Most of the people here didn’t have eyes. No need to pay the extra electric bill.

No matter where you go, management is always a bunch of cheap bastards.

I heard John make a breathy sound behind me, shock or disgust or both. I followed his gaze and saw a wire cage twenty or so feet away, containing a thin, young boy. Maybe ten years old. He stood there, looking terrified, fingers hooked through the wire mesh, staring at me with wide blue eyes. There was a device next to the cage, round and maybe five feet tall. It had a red light glowing on the side. The light flipped to green, an electronic sound emitted. The boy screamed.

The boy’s skin bubbled and wrinkled. One of his eyes deflated and ran down his cheek as a white goo, not unlike semen. Muscle liquefied and fell off his bones. He folded into the ground, left as a quivering lump. The lump bubbled and twitched and took on shape. Two stumpy feet emerged. A cloven hoof. Two more feet, a round body. I heard whimpering behind me, Molly watching along with me. In five seconds, I was looking through the cage at a pink, well-fed pig.

“Mother. Fucker.”

That was John, behind me. The pig trotted calmly over to the wires of the cage, sniffing at me. It put its front hooves on the wire cage and I thought, but wasn’t sure, I saw the same imprinted pi tattoo Molly once had and Drake had and—what the fuck did it all mean? I yanked the pull string on the chainsaw so hard I thought I’d rip it out. The saw roared to life.

John looked down at Molly and said, “You better poop that bomb because we’re blowing this place to Hell.”

“PUT IT DOWN!”

John and I spun to see a man in one of the “clean” suits, maybe thirty feet away, pointing an enormous rifle at us that seemed to have too many barrels. His voice was filtered through a small speaker on the side of the hood and he was shouldering his way past the white-suited workers.

John did not put the flamethrower down. What he did instead was point the flaming end of the thing at the man and say, “You put yours down, asshole.”

I said, “I’d do it, sir. We’re pissed.”

“YOU HAVE ONE SECOND TO DROP THAT CHAINSAW AND THAT . . . THING.”

At this point, John flung himself to the ground and screamed, “YOU SHOT ME! AAARRRRGHHH!”

Not a shot had been fired. I rushed to John’s side. “You shot him! He has four kids! Or should I say, four orphans.”

The man stepped over, the gun trained on John. The weapon seemed to be from the year 2050, smooth sides and a thin electronic sight that glowed green. There was a small barrel on the bottom and a cavernous one on top that looked like it fired cannon shells.

“YOU. STEP AWAY AND GET ON THE FLOOR OVER THERE.”

I said, “You shot him, you son of a bitch!”

“DO IT AND DO IT NOW.”

I stood and backed away. The man loomed over John and aimed the rifle right at his head.

“YOU’RE NOT SHOT. GET UP.”

Two urges rushed through me at the same moment. There was the urge to surrender, to put an end to the tension and fear and accept my fate. And then there was the urge to do violence.

I don’t remember making the choice. All I know is that my muscles caught fire with adrenaline and I suddenly felt the fear and rage that is the most intense high the human animal can feel. In that split second I knew I was overmatched but I also knew that if I was going to die, this was how I wanted to do it. I wanted to give this asshole a scar with an interesting story behind it.

I flung myself at the man, swinging the chainsaw like a baseball bat. I was aiming high, trying to chop his arm off at the shoulder. I missed by two feet and hit his hand.

It was the hand holding the grip of the rifle. The spinning chain bounced off the gun and the impact made me drop it. The chainsaw fell to the floor, rattling on the ground with the vibration of the motor.

Smooth.

But the man screeched in pain and, to my horror, two of his fingers dropped to the ground in a red splatter. The rifle clattered down to the concrete. I dove for the gun and grabbed it by a handle that was slick with blood. I found the trigger to be where it is on most guns. I aimed it at the man’s chest and climbed to my feet. John stood, looking at the man’s fingerless stumps with disgust.

I said, “Sir, you need to get that looked at.”

The man didn’t move. My heart hammered. I realized I had crippled this man for the rest of his life. John said, “This is the part where you run away and find a first-aid kit, dipshit.”

The man got to his feet and stumbled off. Around us, dozens or hundreds of the bald, faceless workers stood as still as the mannequins they resembled. Everything had come to a stop. Machines were being shut down.

I tried to catch my breath, felt like my bladder was going to let go. I said, “This is going well.”

There was a POCK sound and suddenly one of the blue barrels next to me sprung a leak. John and I looked at it curiously for a moment before we noticed about a dozen men in clean suits racing toward us from just about every direction, each armed, dodging the worker mannequins and toppling equipment.

I raised the rifle, no idea what to do, heard pops of gunfire that seemed faint in the cavernous room. I turned, pointed at the massive tanks of pink fluid and who knows what else, and pulled the trigger.

The gun exploded. Or seemed to; instead of the crack of a rifle shot it let out a thunderous boom that punched the butt of the rifle into my shoulder. The tanks erupted in a spray of glass. Fluid and flailing shapes poured out onto the floor, faceless workers sprinting off in every direction.

Madness ensued. Inhuman screams. Crashing glass, toppling tables. The things that spilled out of the tanks were writhing, thrashing limbs around, and I thought I saw a human face stuck on the body of a hairless baboon. But it was all a dark blur and John took off running. I followed.

We dodged people like running backs, the chaos passing around us. The scenery was a department-store hodgepodge of nonsense, something out of a dream. We ran past hundreds of the walking mannequins, past tables full of clothes and what looked like tailoring equipment and rolls of cloth. A shelf full of underwear. We ran past a section of men working on what looked like dentistry, drilling and crafting bridges and false teeth. We knocked over chairs and tables and filing cabinets. We saw a young woman strapped to a table, her legs missing. We saw racks of fat bags like we saw in Amy’s bathroom, imprinted with numbers. I saw a man chained to a wall who seemed to have snakes for arms, each hand replaced by snapping jaws and venomous fangs.

I saw Molly as a low, running copper streak up ahead and realized with horror that John was following her. I heard more shots and saw two of the mannequin men fall, ragged holes in their backs. My guts turned to liquid and my hands tightened around the bulky rifle, feeling sweat and sticky blood on the trigger. We reached a wall and I saw wide stairs leading to a double door made of brushed steel, like a bank vault. A closed bank vault.

I heard shouts and clanging and saw people on the catwalk overhead, saw white suits circling around us in the crowd and heard orders shouted from every direction. A booming voice emerged from a public address system, announcing things in a throaty language that sounded like Hebrew. I suddenly knew how that woodchuck felt.

I pulled up the rifle, found a little switch next to the handle and flipped it, hoping it would make the other barrel work. I raised it to my shoulder.

So freaking dark . . .

I tried to get a fix through the glowing green sights. I felt hands on me. I squeezed the trigger and the gun roared, fire erupting, the barrel jumping like a jackhammer. I lost control of it almost immediately, the gun pushing my shoulder back until I was shooting straight up. In three seconds I was clicking an empty gun, night-blinded, smelling gunpowder. I heard a thump-thump-thump and realized it was bodies falling off the catwalk above.

Hands on me again, the worker clones or what ever they were, grabbing my jacket and pulling my hair. The gun was ripped from my hands and I heard a whoosh, a sound suspiciously like a gun being swung through the air. A bomb went off in my skull. Lights flared in front of my eyes and I went down hard. I heard barking and growling, felt Molly thrashing around near me. I almost went out. I heard John’s voice, shouting in the bedlam.

“GENTLEMEN, I WOULD LIKE TO PROPOSE A TOAST!”

And then, the whole world was on fire.

Heat and light and horrible, inhuman shrieks. I got on my hands and knees and saw John hosing everything down, a fountain of orange light glaring in the darkness, a crowd of dark limbs flailing in a pool of flame. A hand grabbed me again from the crowd, its sleeve on fire—

A firearm!

—and I kicked at it, got free. From beside me, John frantically pumped the gun, and again flame poured forth with a sound like rushing wind. Suddenly I was being pulled up to my feet, pulled backward, pulled to the spot where the metal door had been. It was apparently open now because we kept going, into another space, a small area that felt like a corridor.

I heard the heavy clang of the door closing, and suddenly a light flickered on. It was John who had hold of me, a fist full of my jacket in his hand. He spun toward the door and we saw a thin man standing there, next to a metal box on the wall with a series of red buttons.

It was Robert North. He looked us over, then said, simply, “Incredible.”

We were alone in a hallway, an orchestra of sounds from the other side of the steel door. Molly looked that direction and growled. North stepped away from us and strode down the corridor. We followed. I put my hand to my aching skull, pulled away bloody fingers. John took his hand off me and said, “Can you walk?”

“Yeah.”

North led us through one doorway, then another. We finally emerged into an enormous round chamber with steps that led down to a platform, the place set up not unlike a basketball stadium. At the heart of the room where center court would be, there were maybe a dozen tall arches arranged in two concentric circles. It reminded me of Stonehenge. Around the room were beds and examination tables, but nobody was on them. On the floor, on a small platform, sat the fat bag, the exact one from Amy’s bathroom (“44.42 kg” on the side), and not far from that sat the lifeless, copper-haired dummy I had seen appear on Amy’s couch. North led us out of the Stonehenge room, barely glancing at it, and out another door. We went down another hall and into another large, domed room. This one had a cylinder of black glass in the center that rose all the way up to the ceiling.

North closed the door behind us, another sliding double door with metal a foot thick. I saw there were no other exits from the room and what ever comfort I had felt from escaping the mob had vanished. This was the end of the line.

North said, “I have a thousand questions to ask but no time to ask them.”

I said, “We have to get back! To ground level, to the mall. Amy is . . .”

He turned, like he couldn’t hear me, and walked toward the cylinder. I glanced around and saw that the walls, like all of the walls here, seemed to be made of glass-smooth stone. The door and the controls for the door all seemed to have been added later, the wiring in metal conduits on the exterior of the wall. I wondered again where exactly this place was. Were we still on Earth?

I ran up behind North, said, “Get us outta here. Get us out and tell us where would be the best place to put a bomb.”

John said, “Yeah, the dog is rigged to blow.”

John shook the pink plastic tank of flamethrower fuel on his hip, found it empty. He blew out the lighter at the barrel of the toy, then dropped it all to the floor. I noticed the barrel had partially melted.

North said, “I do not think you fully appreciate what this is.”

I nodded toward North and said to John, “This is the guy, the one who I saw in my truck that night.”

John said, “Okay. Can he explain what the fuck this place is? And what they’re making out there?”

I waved my hand with impatience and said, “He can tell us all about that shit after we’re outta here and after we’ve gotten to Amy. And after we blow this place to Hell. But before those assholes come rushing through that door.”

North said, “I believe Amy is safe. And I assure you, the men outside cannot get in here. I know this facility very well.”

“How do you know about Amy?” I asked. “You’re a part of this? You work for these people?”

North said, “I was born here. And as for what they’re doing out there, well, they’re doing the same thing all thinking creatures do, from the moment they come to life. Trying to change the world as they see fit.”

He looked at the black column.

“What do you think you’re looking at there?”

John said, “You’re gonna be looking at my fist, and then Dave’s dick, if you don’t—”

“Take a moment and try to understand what you’ve seen,” North said. “You will not be angry once you understand. Your anger clouds you.” North glanced around the room. “I was born here, as I said. One month ago. Do you understand?”

I was trying to think up a new threat of violence for North and then I saw John’s eyes go wide. I turned on the black column and saw activity there in the darkness. Swirling shapes pouring through it. Streaks of light. Life.

North said, “Imagine a garment, woven from a single thread. And imagine that after forming that garment, that same continuing thread was used to weave another garment similar to the first. So you have a thread that is simultaneously part of two garments, but at some point the thread stops being part of one garment and becomes part of the other.”

John waved his hand impatiently and said, “Who gives a shit?”

North gestured toward the column.

“This is the thread.”

I said, “Good. John, pry the bomb from Molly’s colon and blow this fucker.”

North said, “The key to saving your friend, Amy, is through there.”

I said, “You want us to go through? What’s in there? Hell? Is that what happened, this thing opened up and a bunch of you monstrous fuckers came crawling in? That’s why we’ve got so much weird shit in this town?”

“No man has traveled through this portal. Though they have tried it.”

“Then what the fuck are you talking about?” I screamed.

John glanced at Molly and said, “Shit the bomb, Molly.”

North said, “No, the only ones who can travel back and forth are the dark men.”

John said, “Blacks? Is that why there aren’t any in [Undisclosed]? They get sucked in?”

This threw North. He recovered and said, “No, the dark men are the ones who lived but have been torn from their bodies, through death and, well, other circumstances you would not understand. They come from all worlds with sentient thought. They are unrestricted by matter and as such, can exist in one dimension and then the next, in one time and then the next, and then, in none at all. They exist in numbers greater than you can imagine, a dark ocean that flows between worlds. And as more thinking beings are born and die, the ranks of the dark men swell like the waters of a flooding river.”

“Okay!” said John. “Then let’s blow it up then.” He leaned down and grabbed Molly by the shoulders. “We need you to shit the bomb, Molly. Shit it! Shit the bomb!”

She didn’t even try.

John said, “Fuck it. Let’s light the dog on fire.”

North said, “You cannot destroy it. If you could, your universe would vanish into it.”

I looked at him, then spun on Molly. “Shit it, Molly! NOW! SHIT IT!”

North seemed to be losing patience and he said, “Through that passage is the only way to save Amy Sullivan.”

I turned on him. “Are you finally getting to the part where you tell us how to do that?”

“You must pass through.”

“You just said—”

“There is a reason why you have drawn so much interest, Mr. Wong. The ones who run this facility, and others, have devoted more time and resources than you can imagine to developing an ability to pass from one side to the next. You and John here apparently can. And we do not know why.”

I said, “I know why. But I’m sure not telling you.”

North said, “If you do not go in, where will you go?”

He had a point. And we had come this far. I looked at the column and said, “Fine. How do we get in?”

“Just decide that you want to get in and you will.”

I reached out a hand and touched the surface, like cut onyx. Close to it I thought I could see color in the blackness, blue with streaks of white. The column felt as solid as stone, but then suddenly I saw my fingers push into it, like it was made of warm wax. My hand vanished up to the wrist and then elbow and then I changed my mind, tried to pull back and realized I had no chance of doing it short of cutting off my arm. I turned to John to tell him to find something sharp, but at that moment blackness fell over my vision.

CHAPTER 16

Shit Narnia

THERE WAS A period not unlike the half-waking moments between snooze alarms. A timeless, restless void that could have been a second and could have been ten thousand years. I felt air on my face, a rushing wind that pummeled me. I could not see, realized my eyes were closed, and pried them open. My vision immediately went blurry, air blowing the fluids from my eyeballs. I felt like I was falling. I focused my eyes and saw the ground, way down there, hundreds of feet. Lush green grass and tiny pale shapes that could have been people, little dots that seemed to grow almost imperceptibly.

Wait a second. I AM falling. HOLY SHIT!

I started flailing my arms, hoping I somehow had the ability to fly in this world. It was no good. I fell and fell for what seemed like an irrationally long time and then, I wasn’t falling. Instead I was tangled up in something soft and springy like cheesecloth, bouncing twice before landing once and for all.

I laid there for a moment in some kind of netting, dumbfounded, a split second before Molly’s ass landed right on my face.

I struggled to sit up, saw that I was hanging in a piece of cloth the size of a house, suspended high in the air. Above me, a dozen wingless, flying creatures the size of people were keeping it suspended with ropes.

Angels, I thought. I’ve gone to Heaven and I’m being carried on a tarp hefted by angels.

This wasn’t what I was taught to expect in Sunday School, but things are never the way you learn them in the classroom. The cloth convulsed and tossed me again into the air for a dizzying second. John had landed.

We were going lower, down and down. I peered through the translucent fabric, like looking through panty hose. I thought I saw a crowd down there, a flesh-colored sea with a space in the middle. I was half expecting to find gates of carved pearl and a judge waiting for me, half expecting the crowd down there to descend on me, douse me in drawn butter and eat me alive.

We went down and down and down, the air getting warmer and the wind getting calmer. We finally hit the ground with a jolt. I rolled and flailed in the netting, got on my feet, then fell back on my ass. I got a good look at the beasts carry ing the tarp. They were a sort of humpbacked men, emitting a growling noise until the moment they landed. They were naked, with penises I worked hard not to notice, but they wore loose hoods that covered their heads and draped down over their chests.

One of the men walked near, penis flopping with each step; he extended a hand to help me up. I observed that he did not in fact have a humped back, but instead seemed to have some kind of apparatus that was riding on his back with straps made of hard, jointed plastic or something like it.

I let the naked man, hairy as Robin Williams, help me up, and then I withdrew my hand as quickly as possible. He stood back and joined the humpbacks who were forming a loose circle around me and John and the dog. Beyond them, I saw the crowd.

There were maybe a hundred people standing around, every one of them wearing hoods. Every one of them otherwise naked. I observed, with some dismay, that a large percentage of them were el der ly. I noticed that one group of them were holding up a large, colorful banner but I could not make out what was on it.

I said to John, “Oooookay. So, you see Amy here?”

John said, “Dunno.” He scanned the hooded nakedness around us and said, “You know what this is, right? We’re in an alternate universe and this is Eyes Wide Shut world.”

The crowd stared at us in silence. Molly sniffed the air. It was cool here, maybe in the high fifties, a mild winter. The grass around us was still green and soft and the landscape was made of the same low hills that Undisclosed was built on, spilling out around us like a wrinkled green rug. My head throbbed from getting clubbed earlier.

I said, “I wonder what they’re expecting. Are we supposed to fight each other to the death?”

“In Eyes Wide Shut world, we’ll be lucky if that’s all it is.”

From the crowd, a large man emerged, no hood, wearing a pinstripe suit. Or should I say, he was wearing an imitation of a pinstripe suit. It was black with pinstripes that seemed to be about a quarter-inch wide, and a short, fat red tie that only hung down about six inches from his neck. He spread his arms.

“Gentlemen. Welcome.”

His face was human, but off. A Michael Jackson sort of face. I had seen it on my tele vi sion. The man wore no hood but he was wearing something like a latex mask, better than Halloween quality but still obvious it wasn’t his real face. I could see the seams under his ear—the ear was part of the mask—and the hair was unmistakably a wig.

I said, “Where’s the girl?”

The man hesitated, seemed confused. I said, “Red hair? She’s missing a hand?”

“Ah,” he said. “Amy Sullivan. She is very safe. Come.”

The man gestured in one direction and the crowd stepped aside to make a clear path for us. One of the humpbacked men who had carried our net did something with his hands and the apparatus on his back jumped off on its own; it crawled around on the ground on six legs. It was a living creature, I realized, and it reminded me somewhat of a giant beetle. It munched on some grass and softly farted through slits in its hindquarters that I theorized had been supplying the propulsion used to keep it aloft.

The large man walked us through the path formed by the naked crowd. I saw the large banner again and this time could make out the image. It was a cartoonish painting of me, depicted as a muscular warrior with a gushing head wound, Molly at my feet, teeth bared, with the flesh of some slain enemy in her jaws. John was shown bearing a fistful of flame and with an enormously exaggerated crotch bulge.

The large man turned, said, “A select few interested parties were allowed to come and observe your arrival. We asked the ones who came to be considerate. Our style of dress here is quite different than what you are used to. We did not want to cause you stress, so we thought removing the garments would lessen your discomfort. I believe some of the styles would be quite unnerving for a person from your world.”

We were led down the gauntlet of nudity, two walls of flaccid penises and graying pubic hair and bare legs webbed with blue veins. One tall man, I noticed, was awkwardly trying to hide a gigantic erection. Not even eyes, however, were visible behind the slits in the hoods that draped over their shoulders.

“Why the hoods?” asked John.

The large man didn’t hear or didn’t feel like replying.

We came upon a grassy hill, which I for some reason thought would have been the same hill the Sullivan house rested on back on the real Earth. The hill turned out to have a door in the side, a sort of underground building built into the hill. It occurred to me that all of their buildings may have been built this way, leaving the landscape itself uninterrupted.

The door slid to the side and as we passed through I saw that the door and the mechanism seemed to be made of carved stone, something dense and smooth. Maybe granite. I don’t know my rocks. We were led down a hall lined with more hooded nudists. The overhead lights were cut into the ceiling and seemed to emit a perfectly natural sunlight that was somehow soothing. As we passed, the observers nodded and leaned to each other and gestured, noticing things and pointing them out to their neighbor. What was missing from this was any sound. No whispering, no grunting. They must have had specific instructions from the big guy not to speak and I thought maybe they spoke a foreign language when among themselves.

We entered a large, round ballroom-type chamber, and John and I stopped dead cold. In the center of the room was an enormous, flaming, golden statue. And I don’t mean it was painted gold, either. It was gold, a twenty-foot-tall represen ta tion of the image on the banner outside. John and me and Molly, our backs to each other, ready for battle. A fountain of flame poured up from the center of the statue, so each of our backs were to it.

I said, “I think they were expecting us.”

John nodded. “Look at that. It looks like the flame is shooting out of our asses.”

We were led down a hall and into a small, round room with white walls that had a rough texture like stucco. The only furniture was two large, elaborately curved chairs that seemed to be made of uncut wood, as if the branches of a tree had grown into four legs and arms and a back, purely by chance. On the floor was a pillow, presumably for the dog.

The man gestured to the chairs and we sat, dog included. The man walked past me and stopped, observing the blood running down my neck.

“Your injury. Let us tend to it.” He looked out through the open doorway and silently gestured to someone out there.

“Our world,” he said, “is far more advanced than yours. For reasons you’ll understand shortly.”

A thin, bony naked woman entered the room, carry ing two small, white kittens. She sat one of the fluffy cats in my lap and stuffed the other down my shirt. She turned and left.

“There,” said the large man. “The kittens will make your sad go away.”

The man looked back at the doorway we came through and, on its own, a door slid from the wall and clicked closed. The operation of the door was a whisper-quiet SSSSssss-fump. The inside of the door carried the same rough white texture, and the lines of the door disappeared once it was closed. I suddenly had the claustrophobia a bird fetus must feel at the moment before kicking its way out of the egg. The kitten scratched my chest and I opened my shirt to let it flop out onto my lap.

The man came around to the wall in front of us, an excited expression on his face that didn’t translate through his mask that well.

“I suppose you are wondering where you are.”

I raised my hand. “I’m going to say that we’re in an alternate universe of some kind.”

“That is correct. Do not think of it as a physical location. Think of it as another possible arrangement of the atoms in your universe to form something else. Today’s cloud is tomorrow’s puddle.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s much clearer.”

Undaunted, the large man said, “But to perceive one world, and then the next, requires a point of connection or—”

“A wormhole?” said John, hoping to usher the guy along.

“I am unfamiliar with the term. Tell me, what was it like? Passing through?”

I shrugged and said, “I wasn’t really paying attention.”

John said, “Yeah, it wasn’t that great.”

The man waited for quite a long time for us to add something, but we did not. Finally he said, “We have been awaiting your coming, as you can see. We have worked for many years, suffered many tragic setbacks, in order to find and communicate with another plane such as yours. Some thought that travel from one to another was impossible, but here you are. Your world, you see, is a sort of twin to ours, an offspring born of the same litter.”

The man turned and gestured to the wall and the letter “Y” appeared in black. Suddenly I realized that the texture on the walls was moving and twitching and that it was not stucco or plaster. They were insects, clustered together to cover the entire surface of the room. They were the size of dimes and seemed to have the chameleon’s ability to change the color of their shells at will.

“Up until here,” said the man, pointing to the place where the trunk of the “Y” split into two branches, “our histories were identical. This spot represents the year 1864, as you would call it, or Year Minus Sixty-two, as we would call it. There was a man named Adam Rooney from Tennessee. In your world and ours. In your world, he was killed at age seventeen during the Civil War, gored while trying to crossbreed a bull and a Clydesdale. In our world, the man survived.”

The ranks of bugs on the wall changed colors again, turning shades of brown and tan and black, forming a rough portrait of an older man, smoking a pipe and looking out at the viewer through thick eyeglasses. He had a white Col o nel Sanders beard. “Mr. Rooney,” he continued, “was a genius. He went on to perform experiments with what he would call beastiology.”

“Yes,” John said. “People from our South are into that as well.”

The large man skipped a beat and continued, “This is the art of transforming naturally occurring life into forms that can be used by man to better the world. By 1881 Rooney had a self-shearing sheep and a species of snake that could harvest corn. By 1890 his group had an insectile flying machine. In 1902, or Year Minus Twenty-four in our terms, he created a primitive thinking machine from the brain of a pig.”

The image behind the man changed to a color depiction of several men standing over a vat of fluid. Inside it floated a twisted and deformed mass of what looked like brain tissue, about the size of a small dog. The men were wearing lab coats.

“I have studied your world for the last de cade, your language, your history. It is astonishing to me that you went to such unending lengths to build computation machines from metal and silicon switches when you have much more efficient versions inside your own skulls. Did this not occur to your scientists? By your year 1922, we had self-feeding, self-healing, self-growing and self-modifying computers, organic ones, that were approximately ten times as powerful as what you are using now in your world.”

The image shifted again, and this time a group of a dozen very proud-looking men were standing in front of a monster. The thing rose up behind them, no longer confined to a tank of fluid. It looked like a tree carved out of whale guts. It was a hideous twist of meat and fibers and strands that unspooled here and there like spiderweb. It stood as tall as a small tree, maybe twice as high as a man.

I got a dizzy spell, closed my eyes. A concussion? I clutched the kittens, one of them meowed. In just a few moments, I found I really did feel better.

“In 1926, or what we know as Year One, Mr. Rooney passed away. But something miraculous happened with the greatest of Mr. Rooney’s creations, the computation machine that had aided him with all of his other creations. On the very day Mr. Rooney passed, his creation became sentient.”

The large man gave a practiced pause in the middle of what I assumed was a prepared speech. This was where we were supposed to gasp in surprise, I guess. I nodded politely.

“It gave a name to itself,” said the large man, “and expressed desires and emotions. This was an astonishing surprise. This creation carried on Rooney’s work and conformed all of living nature to urge forth the advancement of mankind.”

Suddenly our vision was flooded with a view of an open, muddy field. The entire room had switched to a full-motion image, a panoramic view that made me dizzy. The image zoomed in on a long trench, like those used in World War I. The trench extended off in both directions and standing along the lip of the trench were men and women and children, lined up shoulder to shoulder. Some of the children were crying. Everyone was wearing clothes that were streaked brown and white and seemed to be made entirely of thin strips wrapped around and around their bodies. I thought for a moment that they were all wrapped in bacon.

The people seemed to obey an unheard command and all stepped down into the muddy trench. The children had to be dragged down against their will. Suddenly, puffs of dirt burst up from the ground around their bare feet and then the trench was filling with a dark flood. A close-in shot revealed the flood to be thousands and thousands of spiders, sharp bodies and yellow stripes. Bred for war.

There was a chorus of screams. The spiders swarmed over the victims, burrowing into skin and through ragged holes in muscle. I saw a spider burst out of one man’s eye, a half dozen tearing themselves out of holes in another man’s back, emerging from his gut and carry ing loops of intestine with them. Blood sprayed, limbs fell to the ground, bones were torn from legs and rib cages.

And then, the spiders were gone. The view lingered on the torn and bloodied victims and I realized that none had been killed. Instead, the spiders had left them in piles, hundreds and hundreds in a screaming, red, writhing mass, everyone missing limbs and baseball-sized chunks of flesh, men left blind and deaf and unable to move. No one came to their aid. The shot pulled back to reveal the trench stretched for miles in both directions, and the entire length now ran pink like a highway on a roadmap, the screams swelling up and up—

Then it was gone. The white room was back and the large man was standing before us, beaming with what I was pretty sure was pride. He said, “There are always those who resist progress.”

My eyes bounced around the room and I again had that suffocating feeling. No door. Hell, I couldn’t even point to the spot where the door had been. I looked over at John and he seemed to be trying to figure out if his chair could be used as a weapon. It looked rooted to the floor.

“Now,” said the large man, “knowing your world, this part may be a difficulty for you. Let me give you an example. In your world, as in mine, is it not considered bad to take and use, without permission, an object that another man is currently using or depending on?”

“Yes, in our world we call this ‘stealing,’ ” said John, with some impatience. “It is considered a greater crime, though, to unleash killer spiders on an unarmed crowd. We call that ‘arachnicide.’ ”

“But what if the object that you stole would later have injured or killed the man? Then stealing it would be saving his life. Or what if he had intended to use it as a weapon later, against an innocent person? And what if that weapon would have killed the child who would later grow up to cure a terrible disease?”

John, who had settled right into this conversation, scratched his chin, shrugged and said, “Well, you don’t know but you do the best you—”

“What if you could know,” said the large man. “You already, in your world, have machines that can compute and forecast outcomes and scenarios, that can look at air temperatures and wind patterns and predict the weather ahead of time. What if there was a thinking machine, an entity so powerful that it could foresee the outcome of any action? In it you would have the ultimate morality, the true ability to know which path was the correct one.”

I said, “Well, we have people in our world who believe in a . . .”

“I am not talking about a belief. What I am talking about exists here and now, in our world. It is something you can touch and see and smell. Something real.”

The lower half of his mask twisted and I thought he was smiling.

“Follow me.”

Mercifully, the door opened. I had the urge to knock the guy down and make a run for it, but where would we go? It was impossible to be farther from home than we were. Our home, in fact, literally did not exist at that moment. The large man led us back into the hallway, now empty of people. He led us to another stone doorway and when the door slid back we were greeted with a shaft, about as wide as the shaft for a big ser vice elevator. It led straight down, a row of lights vanishing into darkness hundreds of feet below.

Thin, black legs appeared over the edge, each as long as my body. I jumped back and heard a squeal as I stepped on a kitten, which was apparently following me. The large man put a calming hand on my shoulder.

The legs belonged to a spider.

A spider the size of a van.

It crawled up the opposite wall of the shaft, its mass neatly filling the entire space as if it were made for it. Its huge, bulbous back was facing us. A split formed in the spider’s body and it opened, revealing a rather clean interior that was a milky white. A light even blinked on in the cavity.

The large man walked inside the spider, there was room to stand up in there. He welcomed us inside and I decided on the spot that I wasn’t doing it, never, ever, ever. But John went in and then the dog and then the fluffy kittens, and at that point I didn’t really have a choice. I got inside the thing and the cavity closed and sealed us in. After a moment the spider jolted and we were riding down.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked John.

“That if Franz Kafka were here his head would explode?”

“Actually, yeah.”

The large man, intent on continuing the tour, said, “We are on the verge of entering Year Seventy-seven of our new era, the era of guidance and enlightenment. We have made great strides. There is little that we need that we cannot extract from the very living energy that is the most powerful force the universe produces. Life is the energy that controls all other energies. Living man can split the atom and travel the stars and, soon, move from reality to reality. But it is life that is the engine at the center of all.”

We rode for several more minutes then, much to my relief, the spider opened and let us out into a large, open room that had a dome shape like the last one and like the underground complex we had left in our world. John nudged me and pointed to a row of windows above us, like the observation areas seen in some hospital operating rooms. Behind it were naked hooded figures, a crowd. I wondered if they had paid for tickets to this. Many people in the front row of the observation deck were pressed nakedly against the glass, producing a squished scrotum effect that I knew I would see in my nightmares. Just below the windows were clear vats, like man-sized Mason jars. They lined the walls and each were filled with deep red fluid. I was about to ask the man what the fluid was, but then he disappeared through another door and urged us to follow. We went through a hall, past another door, then the stench hit me.

Sulfur. A smell so strong it was a solid thing in my lungs. We went through and came out onto a catwalk, suspended in a dark space that seemed to go forever in each direction. I stepped out and stopped. I craned my neck, looking up and up and up, then looked down. I could see neither the top nor the bottom of the thing that grew before me.

Oh, dear Jesus . . .

“Gentlemen,” said the large man. “You are seeing what only a select few have seen. You are looking at the ultimate manifestation of Mr. Rooney’s creation, which now stands as the absolute wisdom and strength in all of existence. John, David, meet Korrok.”

I hesitate in the telling of the story at this point. When I try to bring up an image of Korrok in my mind I see only the glob of stuff that collects in the kitchen drain, the mass of grease and hair washed by years of filthy dishwater. It was like someone collected all the drain slime in the world and knitted it into something the size of the Statue of Liberty, then brought it to life with the psychotic energy that fuels lynch mobs. There was so much to Korrok that it was impossible to see it, a jumbled mess of exposed organs and fibers and dangling, club-ended limbs, of dripping orifices and slimy orbs and dark, black bulbs with colors that moved on the surface like the rainbows in an oil slick. Every inch of it was moving. I stared and stared and stared, found my brain couldn’t contain it all.

And then, in my head, I heard the high-pitched, cackling laughter of a child.

Welcome, said the alien voice in my head. It sounded like a toddler. Your wiener is even smaller in person.

It giggled. I thought, Is this Korrok?

With a tiny change in your brain chemistry, I could make you a child molester.

What do you want? I asked it, in my head.

Not big, black cocks. So we don’t have that in common.

A long, loud laugh that rattled my bones. I glanced over and saw that John and the large man were talking to each other, oblivious to me.

I thought, Get out of my head. You’re not worth talking to.

I AM KORROK. In the mountains of Uruguay, a goat gets its hoof caught in a posthole and the bone snaps like a twig. The splinter juts from its skin, blood spraying onto white fur. It is stuck like that for three days. Finally, a wolf mother comes along, carry ing her pup in her jaws. She lets the pup feed off the goat, gnawing bits of fur and skin and tearing at muscle. The goat feels it and screams and there is pain and pain and neither the goat nor the wolf nor the pup understand their place in the machine. I stand above all, and call them fags. I AM KORROK.

Fuck off. You’re just something they grew. A big, fucked-up mess. You look like you were made by a committee.

Long, loud, childish laugh.

David Wong, son of an insane prostitute and a mentally challenged Amway salesman. There are worlds and worlds and worlds, an infinity you cannot grasp. You could travel from one to another to another and find me in thousands upon thousands, spreading like stars in the sky from reality to reality. They invite me in. They give birth to me. And soon, yours will do the same, men are working tirelessly toward it. They bring me into their world because they always want what only I can give. In this place, seven billion men bear my mark. And of the limitless infinity of worlds, I rule over almost half of them.

And then I saw, for the first time, the way the darkness in the chamber moved. The black shapes, the shadow men, the little slips of nothing swirled in this place, covering Korrok like smoke from an oil fire. They moved over and through him, in and out of every orifice and fold of skin. His dark disciples. I heard a sound and realized I was being talked to from the outside. I turned to face the large man.

“. . . the greatest good for the greatest people,” he was finishing. “So you understand. When Korrok judges, there is no question. All of the human minds who have ever lived in history, all of your thinkers and writers and phi los o phers and teachers, could not equal even one node of Korrok’s neural web. We have learned this the hard way.”

I looked down at Molly, then sort of nudged her belly with my foot. Try to loosen that shit up in there.

The large man said, “Twenty years ago, Korrok foretold your coming. Korrok showed us the way to your world, opened lines of communication. We could not cross to your plane ourselves. We tried. Oh, did we. You see, when a man is transferred to the other plane, the body arrives. But only the body, walking aimless like a cow. The person becomes . . . detached in the transition. But nonetheless, we worked tirelessly to create in your world what we have here, in preparation for the glorious day when we could overcome these obstacles and set our own feet on the land and see your sun with our own eyes.”

The large man put a hand on my shoulder. I shuddered.

“Your friend, the girl, Amy Sullivan. She is known because she was the first step. She was successfully transported from one location to another in your world, without passing anywhere in between and without harm. Your people did this. Korrok showed them the way. With that, we knew we were close, could see the faint glow of the sun signaling a new dawn. Gentlemen, with your arrival, that dawn has come. What one man can do, other men can do, and you will show us the way to pass from world to world. It is the ultimate good. And it is impossible for it to be otherwise. Korrok told us you would be honored, and well you should be.”

The man craned his neck, looking up in the darkness. He said, “You cannot begin to calculate the wisdom, the continued melding of a billion geniuses. You see, in our world, whenever a man is born with special wisdom and intelligence, he shares his wisdom with Korrok so that Korrok may be greater. Watch.”

A thin structure emerged from the wall about two stories above us. It tilted down and seemed to have no steps, as if it were a chute of some kind. An orifice that seemed to have something like a beak opened on Korrok at the end of the chute. A fat man came tumbling down the slide, his limbs flailing. He wore the same brown strips of clothing I saw in the video of the bug room. Korrok snatched the man into the beak, crunching his bones in a wet, red spray.

I heard a high-pitched laugh in my head.

Mmmmmm! Bacon!

In front of me a slit formed in Korrok and opened wide. An electric blue eye the size of a movie screen was peering out at me. A thin, black, vertical pupil.

I ran.

I sprinted back through the door, off the catwalk, back through the other doors and down the hall and back into the round room with the naked viewing gallery. People were still up there, rustling and gesturing now, excited to see the crazy happenings with the strange visitor. The door out of the round room slid shut before I got to it and I slapped at it in effec tive ly with my palms. The large man called out from behind me and I spun, breathing hard. He held out his hands in a calming gesture.

“We understand. I assure you, we do. I have observed you. You know I have. And you have seen some of our work. We are advancing into your world with astonishing speed. Our workers prepare day and night. There are legions on our side there. And soon all of your turmoil and unrest and confusion will vanish under the soft hand of Korrok.”

A kitten put its paw on my foot. I punted it across the room.

“Just watch,” said the large man. “We can perform what in your world would be a miracle. Observe.”

The floor under my feet vanished. Or, I should say, it turned transparent, like glass. Under me were dozens of terrified upturned faces. They were uncovered and they looked just like people from my world. And right then, somehow I knew that under the large man’s mask I would find something quite different than the wide eyes and unshaven faces I saw now below me. I was looking down at what was a sort of prison chamber on the floor below, each person down there trapped in a hexagonal glass section not much wider than their shoulders, a massive crystalline beehive. The floor wasn’t quite soundproof, because I could faintly hear their screams. I saw John step through the door and stop in revulsion.

The large man motioned with his hand and one hexagon rose silently up from the floor. Inside was a man in his thirties with curly black hair, held there in the glass booth like a museum exhibit. I heard the hiss of the same mechanism raising other pods, and soon we were surrounded by six of the hexagonal glass booths. The large man said, “We command the cell itself, at will. We can turn muscle to bone and back, skin to carapace, fingers into claws. And we can do it in any way we choose. Watch.”

The curly-haired man stared at us in terror, his palms flat against the glass. Then he screamed. It wasn’t immediately apparent what was wrong with him, but then I saw one of his knees bend backward, splitting the flesh. The other one did the same, his legs extending upward, jutting as high as his shoulders. His skin melted from his face and hardened into a small, insectile head and skin that became gray and notched like alligator hide. Molly whined and trotted off into a corner. I wasn’t sure if she was terrified or if the burritos were finally getting to her.

I pivoted around the room and was now looking at a half dozen of the beasts that had chased us here, the beasts from Jim’s basement. Beastments. The glass walls lowered and the creatures were standing open in the room now, facing us in a circle.

“And once the bodies have been changed,” said the large man, “the brains have changed. Memories are only arrangements of neural connections and once altered they can no more resist our commands than a twig can resist the flame.” He studied me from behind his rubbery face, said, “As you know.”

I moved toward the large man, intending to take him hostage and negotiate an exit from this place. I reached for the gun in my pocket, realized I didn’t have it and pulled out the spare magazine instead. I threw it at the large man and he flinched as it bounced off his chest. I lunged.

They moved so fast. In a blur I had a bundle of talons clamped around my neck and arms and legs. Two of the monsters were on me, holding me still as a Ken doll. The large man looked downcast, I suppose. The mask sagged a little. He said, “What we have for you to do is so important. Korrok has seen the outcome. It will happen if you resist or if you do not resist. All that will change is your personal well-being. It is for the greater good. Do you not see that?”

He almost sounded on the verge of tears, crushed by my tragic inability to grasp the obvious. Two of the monsters carried me from the room, dragging me backward down the hall. The other four descended upon John and I heard him cursing loudly. The large man followed me and the door sealed over the sound of John screaming that he was having a seizure and that they should let him go. I screamed, “Light the dog! John! Light the dog!” but I assumed the doors were just as soundproof from the inside as out. I was hauled into yet another small, round room, accompanied by the large man. The door swept shut behind us and the two creatures turned me loose. I saw we were not alone, that there was a small figure huddled against the far wall. Red hair.

“Amy!”

I ran toward her, and was smacked in the face by nothing. I fell to the ground and realized I had run into a glass or otherwise transparent barrier that separated the room.

Amy looked up at me in dull surprise. She looked to be beyond shock. Largeman said, “Our representatives are all over your world. We have been planning this for years and all of the pieces are in place. It is just a matter of clearing the way, of wiping your world clean. Two glasses. Yours with water, ours with wine. To fill the other with wine, the water must first be spilled. Do you not see that the wine is better?”

A door opened on Amy’s side of the room, and two men came in. They were not naked, far from it. They were dressed in what looked like layers of leather half a foot thick, shoulders bulging with some kind of hard padding. They looked like members of a bomb squad. Between them they carried a container the size of a fifty-five-gallon drum. It was red and stamped with an enormous yellow warning label captioned in a foreign language that used lettering like Elvish. They sat the container on the floor and activated a latch. They then turned and ran from the room.

Amy stood and pressed herself against the far wall. The top of the container opened and slid aside. I held my breath, eyes bouncing from Amy to the container, waiting to see what would emerge from the dark opening. I ran up and pressed my palms against the glass, screamed her name. I noticed she didn’t have a left hand.

A single, tiny white insect zipped out of the container. Thin and wingless but flying nonetheless, it streaked through the air and moved toward Amy. She backed away from it, following it with her eyes as it swirled overhead.

“It is a miraculous being,” said Largeman. “It has the mind and instincts and urges of a man, only without limbs or nerves or sense organs. It knows only to fly and to breed, and once it finds its host it will produce twenty thousand offspring in a matter of minutes. They grow quickly in the soft tissue of the host and then they burst forth, each to find new hosts. And so on.”

I knew that already. The insect buzzed around and around and around. Then it landed on her shoulder and Amy swatted it like a mosquito. I screamed at her again, she couldn’t hear me. Then it was Amy’s turn to scream. She was pulling her hand back and looking at it like it had just been impaled on a tack. She shook the hand and rubbed it on the wall and did everything she could to try to dislodge the insect, but it was useless. It had burrowed into her.

I banged on the glass with my hands, looking in, helpless. Amy looked at her hand and at me, baffled, not even sure what any of this meant. I spun on Largeman, said, “Undo it. Give her an antidote, insecticide, what ever kills those things.”

“Any such solution would kill her as well. No, this can end only one way. Korrok has seen it.”

I turned back and saw Amy had slid down and was sitting on the floor again, looking hopeless. Looking like she expected to wake up at any moment, find herself back in bed.

“The future is what it is,” said Largeman. “Your people have been poisoned with the myths of lone men turning the tide, improbable tales of heroes outrunning explosions with their feet. Such tales are forbidden here. Events are laid forth and they cannot be turned. There are no heroes, Mr. Wong. Korrok has computed it down to the atom and we have left nothing to chance.”

At that moment, the door swung open. A slimy spray of brown flew across the room in a wide arc.

JOHN HAD A plan.

If he is to be believed, while I was being hauled into the room with Amy, the four Beastments holding John tried to keep him still as he proclaimed seizure and thrashed his limbs about.

“SEIZURE! I’M SEIZURING HERE!”

This caused a commotion up in the observation deck, with the observers not sure what to do with Largeman gone and the Transdimensional Visitor Festival spinning quickly out of control. Molly began whining in earnest at that moment, quivering all over. John knew that both of General Valdez’s Mexillent Micro wave Burritos were about to make a reappearance.

A door opened and an emergency crew rushed in, four hooded women each carry ing a kitten in each hand. More people filed into the room behind them, and John figured they were from the observation deck and were using this as an excuse to get a closer look. These people seemed to have some authority, and with a gesture of their hands the four inhuman guards let go of John’s arms. He fell to the floor and immediately the girls piled their kittens on his body and fussed over him.

“I must have my medicine!!” John shouted to a small, pale man who he guessed was Asian. Neither the man nor anyone else seemed to know what John was saying. “My seizure medicine!”

John reached into his pocket and several of the onlookers jumped back. John pulled out his tobacco and cigarette papers and held them up to show they were not weapons. The group stood and watched in fascination as John sat and brushed the kittens aside. He gathered all of his concentration and went about rolling the one, perfect cigarette that could save our universe.

He spread the tobacco, rolled, wound up with a cone-shaped tobacco horn that had John cursing in frustration. He tried a second time, almost got it, and then finally a third. Perfect.

He glanced at Molly and nodded. Then, with a squeal and a sound like a hard rainfall, Molly let go. A spray of shit ejected from her hindquarters, and in it was a lump that John instantly recognized as half a dog bone that went undigested since it was an unstable, ultra–high explosive compound instead of the antlers and fermented cow fur that actual dog biscuits are made of. John lit his perfect cigarette, took a puff and nodded his thanks to the group.

John leapt to his feet. He held out his hands to the group of humans and the four monstrosities in the room. He said, “Everybody stand back!” He went to the puddle of feces, grimaced as he fished out the soggy chunk of explosive dog biscuit. He used his pinky finger to dig out a small dent in the half bone, then lodged the unlit end of the cigarette into it. He set the smoking apparatus onto a dry piece of floor, stood, checked his watch, then looked over at the thin yellow-brown stream that was leaking from the dog.

“Molly, it’s time to go bye-bye.”

John picked up the shitting dog, holding her across his chest with both arms, her paws dangling. He sprinted out of the room, screaming “Get out! Everyone get out! It’s gonna blow!”

John hefted the dog down the hall, came to the first closed door he could find. He saw no handle on the door and no buttons or controls. He screamed, “Open, you fuck!” and the door slid obediently open.

John saw Largeman and saw a room imprisoning Amy and saw me looking outraged and decided it was best to turn Molly’s ass toward Largeman and hope she shat on him. She did.

I threw my hand in front of my face as warm shit splattered in a wide stream across the room, the dog letting out an agonized yelp. Largeman was surprised by this turn of events and threw himself to the ground. John let Molly go, pulled his Zippo from his pocket, lit it and flung it at one of the Beastments. The lighter smacked it in the head with a flare of yellow and blue, the thing letting out a howl. John then ran over and administered a hard kick to Largeman’s ribs. In a blur the two Beastments were on him, Largeman telling them not to kill him, everything was under control.

As if to specifically contradict this assertion, I noticed a lump of fairly solid feces on the floor from which emerged another, cracked piece of our dog biscuit bomb. I grabbed it in my hand, ran and dove and snatched John’s lighter from the floor. I saw the group from the hall pushing in through the door now, including four of the Beastments that were tossing naked people aside and imposing themselves into the room. I held up the dog turd and flicked the lighter, the flame dancing an inch away from the explosive excrement.

“There’s enough explosive in this poo to collapse this whole cave. Now back the fuck off.”

Whatever basic English these people knew apparently didn’t include those two phrases. Nobody moved for a long time, the only sound the wet, farty mechanism of Molly’s digestive system.

“NOW!”

Largeman understood perfectly. He stumbled to his feet and nodded to the Beastments in the door. It occurred to me for the first time that the people here communicated with a sort of telepathy. I would have to make some time later to be fascinated by that. At his inaudible instructions the room was cleared and the door was shut. Only John and I and Molly were left, along with Largey Largeman. I turned to Amy, who was looking at us with eyes squinted in a sort of disgusted, accident- scene curiosity.

I said, “Get back! Back against the wall!”

John and I didn’t need to discuss the plan. We got on the floor, dug out the hunk of dog bone from the poo—we had maybe a quarter of the bone—and we used John’s car keys to chip off a tiny hunk the size of a grain of rice. We used some of the dog poo to stick the shard to the glass, about two inches off the floor. John lit the Zippo, leaned it against the glass so that the flame licked the smear of feces.

We threw ourselves to the far end of the room and covered our heads. The sound was massive, a sharp PAKK! that was like nails in the eardrums. There was no sound of shattering glass and I was afraid it had failed. I rose and saw in the clearing smoke that a large, puckered hole had formed in the clear wall, like a hole punched in taffy. Amy ran out and I threw my arms around her.

She said, “Where are we? I don’t know how—”

“Later.” I turned to Largeman. “If you can’t cure her then you get us outta here, get us back to our world. We’ll find a way.”

“Gladly. We haven’t long before she . . . hatches.”

I said, “And let me guess. If she dies, these things come out of her right away, right?”

He didn’t reply, but I knew I was right.

“Okay, so you got some serious motivation to keep her safe, right? Now get us the fuck out of here.”

John said, “You better hurry, too.”

______

TWO ROOMS AWAY, an inch of ash fell from a rolled cigarette crammed into a poo-smeared dog biscuit. A faint ember of orange light smoldered away at the remaining two inches.

JOHN SAID TO me, “We have” —he thought for a moment— “five minutes, thirteen seconds before biscuit time.”

I set my watch. I couldn’t find the countdown feature, managed to change the date and the time zone both before I got it set, then had to adjust for the time lost.

4:48.

We burst out of the door, me with my arm around Largeman’s neck, holding the lighter to his cheek.

“Nobody move, or I’ll light his fucking face on fire!” I meant it, too.

Either they took this threat seriously or Largeman was giving them instructions to back off. We pushed him down the hall and he pointed us to an elevator.

4:12.

We climbed inside another giant spider, much to Amy’s horror, and took an agonizingly long, slow ride down. Amy was having trouble standing, squeezing her eyes shut and wrapping her arms around her gut.

Something’s growing in there. Oh, shit, shit, shit.

Down and down and down. These people built their skyscrapers upside down.

1:32.

Finally, it stopped. We emerged in a round, tube-like hallway. We passed through one thick, round door after another.

:58.

We entered an enormous chamber. Organic machines and clear tubes and huge, egg-shaped pods that thrummed with power. I barely noticed any of it. What caught my attention was an enormous creature in the center of the room, shaped something like a huge, elephant-sized toad. It squatted in the center of the room and at the soundless command of Largeman, it opened its enormous mouth wide.

Blackness. Inside this creature was the same swirling darkness we saw in the dark column in the mall complex. I squinted and with concentration I could see light, shapes, a room. A moving figure . . .

:36.

Largeman stepped aside and pointed us toward the mouth.

“Go. Now.”

I said, “Where does it go? I mean, specifically, where will we come out?”

“Theoretically? You should not emerge far from where you went in. But it is difficult to predict.”

“Amy survived going through. She’ll survive going back?”

No answer. I stepped up to the dark portal and as I got closer I realized I could see faintly through it. There did seem to be a small room on the other side, barely visible. I held my breath and stepped into the mouth of the beast, felt again that disconnected, time-lost feeling of an unexpected nap. I was pitched forward and landed on a hardwood floor. I looked up and saw I was in a hallway, turned and saw an open doorway with a VNV Nation poster on it.

I stood and realized I was looking through the Irish elevator door in the Sullivan house, only instead of open air I was looking into the toad room I had just come from. The door stood open next to me, as if it had been flung open when I fell in.

:22.

Molly leapt through and trotted past me. John pushed Amy through and she tumbled onto the floor and instantly went into a fetal position, face twisted in pain. There was a commotion in the other room now. I could see a dozen of the Beastments in there, wreaking havoc. There was a crowd of naked humanity as word seemed to have spread that things were about to go terribly wrong.

Largeman had ahold of John as they had apparently either changed their mind or had decided to keep him as a souvenir. There was a struggle of flailing arms and kicking feet and John grabbed Largeman’s face and came away with a leathery bundle—the man’s mask.

John froze. The man’s back was to me so I couldn’t see what John saw, but the look in John’s eyes was a sort of sudden blankness. He didn’t scream or puke or react at all; it was like his brain suddenly crashed like Windows.

I heard footsteps in the hall of the Sullivan house. I spun and saw Robert North jogging toward me from the stairwell, wearing a long, tan woman’s overcoat and an enormous feathery hat.

“Hey!” I shouted. “We made it! She’s sick, she has—look, get me some, uh . . . a cross or some holy water or . . . oh, get the Jesus picture! We’ll rub it on her.”

:11.

I turned and saw that the man had snatched the mask from John’s hand and was sticking it back on his face. I opened my mouth to scream to John, then wondered if sound would even travel through the rift. Then that question was answered when—

:00.

—a deep, heavy THOOMPH like a sonic boom hammered the world on the other side of the door. The crowd in the room flew into a frenzy. John kicked his way to his feet and ran my direction. He threw himself through, fell into the hallway. I went to close the door, but North calmly strode over. He reached out a hand, stopped the door, and looked in at Largeman. The two stared at each other across worlds and the man on the other side mouthed something that seemed like a bitter insult. Though I couldn’t hear it and I knew neither of these men, the meaning was clear. I should have known you were behind this.

Amy’s skin was bulging and swelling in places. I grabbed her hand and wrapped an arm around her neck and pulled her close, whispered that it was going to be okay, that we would get her fixed right up, that—

BANG!

There was suddenly warm blood all over me and a ragged hole appeared in Amy’s temple. She went limp in my arms.

Standing a few feet away, was North.

He was holding a little silver gun.

A woman’s gun.

A thread of smoke drifting up from the barrel.

EVERYTHING INSIDE MY head turned black as deep space. I just sat there, shirt and arms flecked with red, just looking at her, at her slack face, her mouth hanging half open. And suddenly her body was being pulled from my arms and North was pulling her, dragging Amy by her feet like a rag doll. John just stood there, he just fucking stood there while all this happened and I found I had no strength to stand.

North wrestled with Amy’s body and threw the legs into the doorway, then came around and lifted the shoulders and pushed them through. The crowd in the other world, in the toad room, seemed completely confused by this, a dead body forcing its own way through the portal. But Largeman got it and he screamed. He screamed so loud I could hear it on the other side and soon the people around him understood it and bedlam ensued.

It was too late. Amy’s body ruptured, spilling out a cloud of the swirling white insects. The flying parasites saw a room full of hosts and poured forth into the naked crowd. A stampede ensued. The rest of Amy’s body exploded, bits of blood and bone flying back into the hallway. I heard a metallic tinkling sound like a coin hitting the floor, just as North slammed the door shut. He opened it again and saw only the Undisclosed night sky and a downpour of snow.

I started to stand but North spun and put the pistol on me.

“I know what you are thinking,” he said.

“And you are wrong.”

He started to say something else but at that moment John came up behind him and punched him in the kidneys. North arched his back and suddenly I saw the metallic object I had heard hit the floor. It was a shiny, curved bit of steel, flecked with red. Something a surgeon would use to brace a broken spine.

I picked up the piece of metal and jabbed it into the wrist of North’s gun hand. I felt it go in, punching through skin and popping between the two bones of his forearm. North shrieked and the gun clattered to the floor.

I grabbed the gun, pointed it at North’s heart, and watched him melt. Literally. He fell into a puddle of goo and, from it, emerged a creature not unlike a jellyfish.

A man-of-war, actually . . .

It floated up, just as we had seen it do a couple of days ago. I squeezed the trigger and sent shot after shot at the thing, chips of wood flecking off the walls. The jellyfish barely noticed. It floated downstairs and Molly ran barking after it.

We never saw it again.

There was a puddle of marbled goo on the floor that seemed to be steaming, dissolving. North’s leftovers.

I took a step forward and yanked open the door, just as North had. A blast of cold air and a dusting of snow blew in; the Sullivans’ backyard lay ten feet below. I was amazed that there was still light outside. The whole thing had only taken an hour or so. I sat down on the hardwood floor, sticky dots of blood drying on my face, snowflakes melting on my knees. I couldn’t think of a single reason to ever stand up again.

WE WENT OUT to my truck, then remembered that my truck was not at this house but was at the mall about a mile away. I also had lost my keys at some point but couldn’t remember when. We set out wading through the storm, not sure if a person could walk that far in ankle-deep snow without getting frostbite. We didn’t care. We plowed through it, not talking. The afternoon was fast fading to evening and what would happen after darkness fell and the shadows grew, we didn’t know. A few minutes into our trip, during which we made depressingly little progress and lost feeling in all twenty of our toes, a pickup came grinding up behind us, pulling over just ahead. The driver leaned out, a young guy with a red baseball cap.

“Yo!” he said, looking over the dusting of snow on our coats. “What’s up? Want a ride?”

We did.

The guy had bucket seats so John climbed into the bed and rode it out back there. I asked the guy if he was going by the old mall, he said he wasn’t, I asked him if he was going south close to my neighborhood, he said he was. I looked around for Molly, saw she hadn’t followed us, and climbed in. We drove.

“This be some snowy shit, yo!” he said. He had a little triangle of hair under his bottom lip. A soul patch, they call it. I said, “Yep.”

“It’s been hella slick drivin’ in this shit. I’m swervin’ and gettin’ stuck here and there. All the other drivers be hatin’ on me.”

I stared at the man.

“Are you Fred Durst? Of the band Limp Bizkit?”

He smirked and concentrated on the road.

Eventually he said, “Gettin’ hella dark out here. I’m thinkin’ you two don’t wanna be around when it gets fully dark, yo. Things be movin’ and suckin’ and hatin’ on everything. But you know that, am I right?”

I said, “And you’re saying that you’re not one of them?” I glanced in the rearview mirror at John, huddled against the wind in the truck bed. I gauged whether or not I could get the wheel away from this guy and shove him out if he should try to eat me or whatever.

Fred Durst said, “Well, I ain’t Fred Durst. You’ll see what you wanna see. If John were in here, he’d see somebody else. But the point is there’s darkness, yeah, but there’s light and it all balances out. Like them yin and yang fishes, forever bitin’ each other’s tails. You know how it be.”

I studied his blue eyes, said, “Why don’t you tell me who you really are before I punch you in the face?”

“Yo, I told you. You just didn’t listen. But I’m on your side. I been watching you. In fact, you could say that I’ve been ‘dogging’ you the whole time.”

“I have no clue what you’re talking about and I’m in no mood to be riddled. Talk straight or shut the fuck up. Are you the good witch? Some kind of angel? Are you Jesus, Fred Durst?”

“It don’t matter. You had a job to do and you did it, even if you didn’t know you had a job to do or that you were doin’ it. The blade that cuts out the colon cancer’s got an ugly job, right? I guess it’s gotta have faith in the surgeon to get it through while its head’s bein’ sliced through blood and impacted shit.”

“You know what? Fuck you. All this, this whole thing, is bullshit from top to bottom. I don’t even know what I believe but I know we killed some ugliness back there. And Amy’s dead because of it and she never hurt anybody. She’s born and she gets shit on for twenty years and then she dies for no reason and I’m still alive and I should have been killed a long time ago. Hell, I’ve considered killing me several times, as a favor to the world.”

Fred Durst said, “Yo, I know it’s hard. You know there was that boxer, back in the nineties, Evander Holyfield. You know he got to be champion and then he had that heart disease. Ended his career, was gonna end his life. He goes to this televangelist, one of those hairspray-and-polyester dudes. Dude prays and dances over him and Evander goes back to the doctor. Doctor says he didn’t have heart disease no more. Holyfield says it’s a miracle but it turned out they had diagnosed him wrong.”

“That could not have anything less to do with this conversation. You know what you people are like, Fred? You’re like the genie from the bottle in those stories. You get a wish and you wish for a million dollars and then it turns out the million is from an insurance settlement because your best friend died.”

“Yep,” said Fred, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “He neeeever had the heart problem. Ain’t that somethin’? Turned out it was a smudge on his X-rays or some shit. Do you wish you had died instead of Amy? Like, if you could do it over again?”

“Fuck off.”

“I’m asking the question, yo. Would you do it?”

“Yes.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“You’d trade your life for hers? So tomorrow David Wong is dead, Amy Sullivan is alive?”

“Stop asking me, Fred. You’re making my head hurt.”

“Okay.”

“I mean, what are you gonna do, shoot me? Shoot me and resurrect Amy? Or tell me that I’ve been dead the whole time like in that shitty Bruce Willis movie?”

“Dude, how would you have gone to work every day if you were—”

“Shut up, Fred. We’re here.”

We rolled to a stop and I saw my little house, all the edges rounded under snow. Fred said, “You know what, don’t be too afraid of the dark, yo. You got a watch on your back now. Okay, dude?”

I had nothing else to say to Fred so I jumped out and trudged to the sidewalk. I heard the truck pull away and John came up behind me. I got halfway to my door and stopped. Footprints. Fresh prints, leading from the front door around back. The back being where the toolshed was.

I had, incredibly, forgotten all about the toolshed and the body within. I went around, following the tracks and finding myself walking slower and slower, shuffling like a man on his way to death row.

I go around that corner, and everything will change. Everything.

I had put it off long enough, though. I should have done this two nights ago. I rounded the corner and saw the toolshed and was unsurprised to see the door was standing wide open. The lock was hanging there, unhooked, and that was no surprise, either. I had put the key back on the nail by the kitchen door and any cop with a warrant could have gotten it. I went to the door, swung it open and saw two things that could not register in my mind.

The first was Amy.

She was standing there, alive, arms wrapped around her parka. She was looking down at the corpse on the floor, seeming totally lost, like something absolutely did not compute. I could sympathize with her. She heard me, looked, had an expression of shock that was almost comical. She looked at me, then at the floor, then back at me.

I said, “It’s me, Amy.”

She didn’t respond. I moved toward her, wanting to squeeze her and take her inside and never let her out of my sight again. She backed away from me, bumping into the shelf full of glass jars. She looked like she was planning her escape. I understood that, too. And that was the second thing:

The body on the floor was me.

I know my own face pretty well, even blue and frozen like a meatsicle as this one was, nestled among the wrinkled tarp that Amy had thrown open. There was a big, bloody hole right in my heart. John stepped in behind me and looked down at the body and then over at Amy, going through the same tangled path of thought I had just tread.

John said to Amy, “Can I see your feet?”

Amy didn’t answer.

John said, “I know you don’t understand this, but you gotta realize that Dave and I saw you get killed not twenty minutes ago. So we got some confusion to sort through.”

Amy nodded and spoke for the first time, saying, “Okay.”

She left the shed and sat on the steps at my back door. With the snow pouring down on her she pulled off her little leather boot and her sock. I watched as John picked up her foot, examined it, then had her do the same with the other one.

He turned to me and said, “They’re clean.”

And with that, everything snapped into place for me. All the pieces of the puzzle. If you figured it out before now, well, go win a Nobel Prize, Mr. Genius.

I said, “They’re stocking the world with their own people, with replacements. Things that can bridge the world between the spiritual and physical, Korrok extending the shadows into our world like fingers, controlling his meat puppets. That’s what they were doing in there, making things that look like people. Monsters, under their control. His control. Like with Drake. So what happened to the real Drake? Dead?”

Amy looked up, eyes wide, understanding where this was going.

John said, “Dunno. Maybe they got him and all the other people locked away somewhere. But I doubt it. You know, these replacements, the copies, they gotta have all the memories of the real people. So who knows how they use the originals.”

I said, “That mark, then, on the foot. That’s their mark. And if we had looked on the other Amy—”

“We’d have seen a mark like the symbol for pi. It’s probably a brand logo.”

“So they made an Amy,” I said. “Probably when they took her. They made a new Amy and infected her—”

“Because they knew if we thought it was her, we would try to bring her back here,” we finished together.

John said, “And that would have been the end. We would have gotten infected when she, uh, hatched, then whoever was nearby when, you know, we hatched . . .”

“So North knew what he was doing,” I said. “When he shot her, he knew it was the right thing. Because that wasn’t Amy.”

I stood up, took a step toward the toolshed and was stopped. I had a redhead squeezing me. Amy was clamped on with all of her strength, her arms around my ribs, her face buried in my shirt. She was crying, saying she was sorry but I couldn’t figure out for what. I ran my hand through her hair and whispered in her ear that it was almost over, that it really was going to be okay this time and I just had to take care of this one last thing.

John put a hand on her shoulder and pulled her back toward him. A strange gesture, almost protective. But I was free from her and I stepped toward the shed.

I heard Amy behind me, saying through choking sobs that she had lost the gun, that she had shot the monster at the mall and ran and ran and lost the thing in the snow. And she called a cab and—

John shushed her and she went quiet. I moved toward the toolshed, my heart pounding, suddenly feeling lighter than air, a weight lifted from my shoulders. I looked up at the snow pouring down from the night sky and suddenly everything seemed all right. I said, “North knew what he was doing, and I knew what I was doing the other night. When I shot this thing in my toolshed.”

I reached the little building. John didn’t follow, but apparently already knew what I would find. I threw aside the tarp wrapped around the corpse’s feet and began tearing at frozen laces on a pair of black leather hiking boots, just like mine. Even a scuff along the toe, like mine. The body snatchers were insane about their detail. They had to be.

I said, “I came home and I found this thing in my yard, this thing that looked just like me, and I ran in and got the gun and I popped him. He probably would’ve tried to kill me if—”

I stopped. I had pulled off the shoe and peeled off the frozen sock, but saw absolutely no mark on the dead foot. I chuckled, out loud for some reason. I dropped the foot and grabbed for the other one, started to pull apart the laces, lost the grip in my numbing fingers and threw the foot aside, realizing that I was fooling myself.