Decimate, p.26
Decimate, page 26
“Why not?” Margot asks.
“We have no experience opening vaults in unwilling subjects. But I’ll tell you this. When one of us resisted the process during testing, the results got really freakin’ ugly. Also, our memory decks—the three of us who’ve gone over—none of them are as weird as what Poe just described. Your brother has been inside the mind of a living nightmare, a man who somehow got to this crash site before anyone else and then made off with his bloom before anyone saw. Anyone who lived anyway. Whoever he is, this guy isn’t just a passing motorist, OK? We don’t know what we’re dealing with. That means I want the basics we need to catch this fucker, not some deep dive into his crazy.” Randy studies the room in turn, then adds, “Nobody, I repeat, nobody is going inside this guy’s vault. The next time that bridge opens, I need your brother to get on his memory deck and explore the common area without trying to open any doors or drawing attention through the glass.”
“I’m going with him,” Claire says.
“No, you’re not,” Randy says.
“Who are you to tell me I—”
“If you go, there’s more of a delay in when we get the information. We’ll have to wait for you and Poe to come back from this guy’s deck, then for you to recover from the return trip back here. During that time, we won’t know anything about the guy’s movements or location. Who knows how many people he’ll hurt by then? Or worse, neither one of you comes back at all, and then we’ve got squat. And this guy just keeps at it until we can catch up with him on foot.”
“Catching up with him on foot should be your responsibility since you’re the reason he’s got Poe to begin with,” Margot says.
“Hence, my insistence that my team take him down using information Claire gets while she is sitting safely right here on this ranch.”
“How do we know Poe will stay connected to me when he’s over on this guy’s memory deck?”
“We don’t,” Randy says. “We’re going to find out.”
“But we already know Poe sees and hears me through the storefronts on our memory deck. If he’s not there, I can’t talk to him.”
“A one-way connection is better than no connection at all,” Randy says.
“Well, aren’t you a regular Cowboy Socrates,” Abram grumbles.
“So he’s going to be over there alone, is what you’re saying.”
“If he can communicate with us in any way, he’s not alone,” Randy says.
A silence falls. When Claire picks up the pen, she feels everyone’s intense stares.
What do you think? she writes.
you’d just slow me down anyway i mean im just supposed to look right how bad can it bei spoke at an AA meeting in a prison last month I’m super tough promise.
She’s sure it’s a joke, remembers clearly the terror in his eyes when she threatened to cross the bridge herself. And now, after being reunited in some version of death she’s just beginning to understand, she has to abandon him to that fear.
“Fine,” Claire says.
“You’re a direct line to Poe’s brain. We need to keep it that way.”
“Poe still has a brain?” Abram asks.
“Part of one, yes,” Randy says. “The bloom’s got these little blue particles in it, these things that look like pollen. In the presence of a living human, they come out of the bloom and go for your breath like it’s candy. We call them ghost cells. That’s what’s left of Poe’s brain and Agatha’s brain.”
And my brain, Claire thinks, eventually.
“If they’re her brain, why do you call them ghost cells?” Abram asks.
“I said they’re what’s left of their brains. After a shift. And they were put there by exposure to the pulse.”
Abram sits forward. “When my kids were in the hospital, they had, I don’t know, three or four MRIs. All sorts of X-rays. If there were strange cells in their bodies, we would have seen—”
“The only way you would have found these is if they’d done an invasive biopsy of their brain matter, and no doctor under the sun would have done it unless there was a tumor or a growth they could see on a scan. And even then, they wouldn’t have been visible to the naked eye or a microscope. Do you know how they trace magma cones in volcanoes?”
“They don’t actually find the magma,” Margot answers. “They find the outline of the magma. They map the earthquakes that happen above and on either side of it as it rises, and that gives them the shape of the cone.”
“Exactly,” Randy says. “You can do a similar thing in the brain matter of animals that have been exposed to the pulse. There’s a . . . Thomas?”
Thomas clears his throat. “We call it a ‘subtle crowding’ of branches and cells inside the brain that suggests the presence of something that can’t be seen by the naked eye. Until the subject shifts and the rest of the body dematerializes. Then they take the form you saw, Claire, and they’re the only part of the bloom that doesn’t recoil from a person. In fact, they seek it out. Like they’re looking for a new home.”
“How did you figure all this out?” Claire asks.
“Not all of the shifted animals in our cellar just didn’t get out of the way fast enough,” Thomas says. “We exposed some of them on purpose. For some of our tests, we did try to re-create what happened with Claire and Poe. We exposed animals both genetically related and not to the pulse at the same time, right next to each other. Both sets walked away with similar disruptions in their brain matter. But only the genetically related set experienced a psychic connection that was triggered by extreme emotional or physical trauma in the other.”
“Until one of them shifts,” Margot says.
Abram clears his throat. “All right, um. So it feels like there’s two agendas here, maybe. There’s what you guys want to do, which is get Poe back from this psycho, or whatever. Which, you know, I’m all for. And then there’s what I’m thinking about the whole time we’re sitting here talking, and I don’t think it’s off base to say my daughter’s probably thinking about it too.”
“What?” Claire asks.
“What happens to Poe if we get him back? I mean, call me crazy. Apparently I’ve given folks plenty of reason to. But if there was a way to bring your girlfriend back from her memory deck, or whatever, I figure you’d have done it by now. So should we get our hopes up or not? Or the next time I see my son, am I going to have to breathe in his bloom or something?”
Nobody speaks for what feels like an eternity. After just a few seconds of this awful silence, Claire realizes the answer is something none of these men want to share.
Finally, Randy looks at Benjamin Running Creek. “Get me the video.”
Ben rises to his feet. “Which one?”
“Catherine’s visit.”
Ben makes a low, disapproving sound in his throat. The seated men lower their gazes to the floor.
Catherine, Claire thinks. Agatha’s sister.
They sit in awful silence until Ben returns, carrying a laptop computer, which he hands to Randy. He sets a little portable hard drive on the table next to it. Once Randy’s prepped everything, he pushes his chair back from the table and gestures for them to move so they can close in and watch what he’s cued up on screen. Claire does, followed by Margot and her father.
The men stay where they are. Whatever it is, they’ve probably seen it before. Or they’ve lived it.
The screen shows a split camera feed.
On the left side, a pair of headlights pulls up to the ranch’s front gate.
On the right, Agatha’s bloom does its typical languid dance in the center of her chamber.
“The woman driving is Catherine, Agatha’s sister. Agatha never let her on the property. Made her think she was up to something criminal that Catherine wouldn’t want anything to do with. They rarely spoke, but every now and then Agatha would wire her some cash, shoot her an email. I kept it up after Agatha’s shift, but apparently I didn’t do a good enough job.”
As Catherine Caldwell steps from her Volvo station wagon on the left side of the screen, Agatha’s bloom starts to change shape on the right. It brightens, losing its various shades, and what previously looked like tendrils of sea life thickens into a single bright column that fills the chamber with a near-blinding wash of white light.
“She got suspicious because she thought the emails didn’t sound like Agatha. So she decided to pay a visit. A surprise one.”
Randy’s headlights roar up to the gate, and then he pops out from behind the wheel of his black SUV. Clearly unaware of what’s happening down in the cellar, he opens the pedestrian gate, thinking he’ll step out and have a talk with Catherine. Then she angrily pushes her way through, and he grabs her wrists to keep her from going farther.
On the right side of the screen, all semblance of the bloom as some celestial, heavenly body has been lost. It’s a shade of pewter now, and it’s risen by several feet. The top of it has spread across every inch of the ceiling, and still it presses against the surrounding walls. The blue light is gone. In a few seconds’ time, it went from being a writhing mushroom cloud to a geyser that looks like it’s going to coat the entire chamber, top down.
The glass wall containing Agatha’s chamber shatters outward as if from a percussive blast.
The images on the right-hand side of the screen are edited together from several cameras to chart the progression of what happens next. Here comes Ben, running like hell past the animals’ cells, when the door to Agatha’s area comes flying toward him off its hinges. He hurls himself to the floor. A thunderhead of matter from beyond this world roars over him and down the corridor. It’s left the desiccated tree stump behind completely as it goes airborne. Several of the glass walls crack as it passes.
And then, on the left side of the screen, there’s Randy at the front gate answering a call on his earpiece. Clearly he’s being told about the hell that’s breaking loose down in the cellar, the storm that coincided with Catherine Caldwell’s arrival.
“Well, Agatha’s pissed,” Abram says.
“It’s not that simple.”
On the left side of the screen, Randy pulls his gun on Catherine. The shock on her face replaces her desperate anger. Was he really going this far? Forcing her off her own family’s property with a gun in her face?
Then they both hear something, the double doors in the barn’s floor flying off their hinges with a sound like a tornado tearing a storm door free.
Randy fires, high and over Catherine’s head. It looks like he’s trying to drive her away. It works. Catherine scrambles for her car.
And on the right side of the screen, the rest of the bloom has become a single snake of unstoppable force capable of blowing through metal doors and shattering glass and expanding outward from its source with a determination that can only be described in one word: hunger. It’s rising from the double cellar doors it just blew open and into the harsh glare of the barn’s overhead lights. And there is no mistaking its color now.
Not blue. Not pewter.
The color of flesh.
Then Catherine’s taillights whip out of frame on the left side of the screen.
On the right, the snake’s head loses shape, form, and momentum, like the air’s being sucked out of it. Growing more vaporous with every foot of retreat, it floats backward, passing Ben, who’s still gasping and flattened to the floor. Then, despite the destruction and havoc it’s just wrought, the bloom falls back into its previous balletic form, only now its blue light reflects off the jagged pieces of shattered glass strewn all over the chamber floor.
“Agatha . . . ,” Abram finally says.
“She didn’t know what was happening, but she said her vault went nuts. The doors all started rattling in their frames, and she thought they were going to blow open one after the other.”
“She didn’t stop it?” Abram asks.
“She couldn’t. She had no idea what was happening. It stopped when Catherine drove away.”
“And if she hadn’t?” Abram asks.
“Bloom seeks out the breath of anything that’s the same species. What we just saw, I think that’s what it does when it senses someone with its genetic material. I think it was looking for a new home. Her. And God only knows what would have happened if it had made it to her. Look, I know you were probably hoping that when we got Poe back, you’d be able to connect with him again, but—”
Abram’s barreling out of the dining room before anyone can stop him.
Randy gestures for two of the guys to follow him. Rupert and Sean comply.
“Maybe I said more than I should have,” Randy says.
Nobody speaks for a while.
“You could have lied to us,” Claire answers. “Kept our hopes up that there was some way to bring Poe back, just to get us all to go along with all this. But you didn’t.”
“Thanks, I guess,” Randy says.
“I’m going to go talk to my father,” Claire says.
“Claire, if the bridge opens, you gotta come right—”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m on board, cowboy. Slow your roll.”
She picks up the notepad and pen off the table. The other men bow their heads as she passes. She can’t tell if it’s deference or shame.
23
Her father made it no farther than one of the many rocking chairs that line the house’s wraparound front porch, maybe because Rupert told him to stop, or maybe because he ran out of energy. Strange that there are so many chairs out here: she doubts this place hosts many guests. Like the decor inside the house, maybe it’s a design scheme to keep Nazi ghosts at bay.
He’s smoking, which Claire can’t remember him doing when she was a girl. She’s got no idea when he picked up the habit, but the slow curl rising into the cold morning air drives home the years of distance between them.
“Can you give us some space?” she says to Rupert. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Rupert nods, moves off. Sean, the guy who used to follow her in LA, stands out in the grass like he’s watching the house from a distance. She figures he’s monitoring Abram’s possible escape routes.
When she takes a seat in the rocking chair next to his, her father gives her a startled look. Tears glisten in his eyes. His cigarette hand trembles. A snaking white scar wraps around his forearm, the evidence of a vine he struggled through as he ran for help the night of the pulse. She’s heard Poe describe it, but she’s never seen it in the flesh. The wound was still raw and healing over by the time she and her mother moved.
“I didn’t bring you here as bait,” he finally says. “For them. So whatever he’s told you—”
“You didn’t bring me here. You asked me to come. And I did.”
“I was just trying to draw them out is what I mean. I knew they were watching me, and I figured they were watching you too, and I thought if I got us all together we could outrun them. And having Margot and her resources on hand, I figured that was a good deal for all of us. And I did believe they’d crashed that plane.”
“Do you still believe that?”
“No. If everything they’ve told us is true, why would they create this mess? Poe lived on his own miles away from us. If they’d wanted to silence him, they could have just yanked him off a street corner and into a van or something. But I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about me. I’m talking about why I—”
“I get it,” she says.
“Do you? Do you really?”
In the morning sun, her father’s face looks gaunt and emaciated, his stubble patchy, and she’s not sure if the cuts and little red lumps on his jaw are from their crash or a bad shave job the day before. Maybe due to hangovers. He’s got a drinker’s plump, swollen nose. The breakup with Margot could have hit him hard, or a lifetime of going his own way has finally caught up with him.
Claire sets the notepad on the arm of the rocking chair where her father can see it.
“I figured we could all have a talk,” she says.
“I see,” he whispers. “Well . . .”
His words seem to leave him. He sucks in a long drag, and then it’s just the sounds of the birds and the morning sun. A morning like the ones they used to wake up to on their camping trips all those years ago, only a lot colder.
She feels a massaging sensation inside her arm, and her pen starts to move.
if I can quit cocaine and toxic men he should be able to quit smoking.
Abram looks over, sees the message taking shape. The last of his drag puffs from his nostrils dragon-style. She can’t tell if he’s laughing or about to cry.
“Tell him,” Abram finally says, “that, um, when he emailed a couple months ago and asked if he could visit, I didn’t put him off because I didn’t want to see him. I put him off because I . . . because he said he was sober, and I was drinking a lot and I didn’t want to throw him off his game. Can you tell him that?”
“He can hear you,” Claire says. “He can see you too.”
“Right. Lot of windows on the memory deck, or whatever.”
Abram looks into her eyes. For a second, it’s like he’s looking through her and into where he thinks Poe might be.
“You believe what Margot said in there?” Abram asks. “That we turned into a circular firing squad?”
yes, comes Poe’s answer.
Abram looks at the pad and nods.
Sean’s got his back to them now, and he’s probably too far away to hear anything they’re saying.
“I let you both go,” he says. “I knew how bad I fucked up that night. I thought I didn’t have a right to be your dad anymore until I found the truth. But I thought the only way to get at the truth was to tell a story big enough to scare someone into telling the real story. Then years go by and suddenly I’m so far out on a limb I can’t see my way back. I mean, a lifetime of being the alien guy and then I turn around and I realize, How much time have I actually spent here, where it happened? The minute I show up, people are following me like I’m onto something for the first time. Something that didn’t fly off into the stars, something that’s still somewhere here and has been the whole time. How could I be that stupid?”
“You were getting something out of it, though. The conferences, the YouTubes. The Margots. You liked the attention, Dad.”
