Perish, p.12
Perish, page 12
A car honked behind us, and Patrick drove down the street. “Just so you know,” he said, “I’m only going because I know that’s what my mother would have wanted.”
I looked at him. “You don’t need to explain yourself to me.”
“That’s why I like you, Sarah. I never feel the need to.”
We arrived at Lucient, and I discovered Patrick had not exaggerated. For Lucient’s twentieth anniversary, the large convention area included curling archways, gray walls, a white floor, and soft pink roses at all the tables with crystal candelabras and white candles.
At every oversized round table silver trains carried crystal decanters of liquor round and round, through the candelabra and pink roses, in figure eights. The splendor absorbed me.
My red-haired acquaintance progressed among the tables and large gatherings of human beings. I followed him. Near the podium, we approached a dark-haired man just slightly over six feet tall speaking with a couple. Patrick gently circled the man’s arm. He turned around; his flat face featured a pointed chin.
Patrick shook the man’s empty left hand and said, “Congratulations.” He smiled nervously.
The bewildered-looking man must be Patrick’s father. He gazed at Patrick and nodded at his son, the smallest smirk on his lips.
As Patrick said, “I’d like you to meet...” his father leaned back and scanned Patrick’s eyes. It wasn’t a look, a gaze, or a glance. It was scrutiny, as though instead of Patrick Flannigan standing there, he was studying a walking, talking glitch. He touched Patrick’s chin, and Patrick jerked away. Then he straightened and looked around.
His father squinted. “Your cheeks are thin. Your eyes are red. Are you using again?”
Before I could blink, Patrick had turned away. He did not wave for me to follow him but crossed the expanse of white carpet alone, as though embarrassed beyond what he could stand.
The man with the flat face and pointed chin turned back to the man he had been speaking to and drank from his glass. He said, “I know. I know,” softly and looked at his retreating son. I observed him for a moment, intrigued, thinking to myself that this man might have connected with my brother, if he produced something at Lucient that turned paint and apples white.
I stared at his uninterested brown eyes and decided to introduce myself. I held out my hand. “Hi, I’m Jack Harper. Patrick’s friend.”
He rotated toward me and stared at my hand for one dismissive second. He began to turn back, but then he took a second glance at me, and his eyes narrowed. He cocked his head. He searched my face, as though rifling through a yellowing old photo album, and frowned.
“Do I know you?” His eyes danced quizzically over my face.
I released a big smile. He had just given me everything. Someone had mentioned me to him. Someone had shown him my face. “Congratulations on your twentieth anniversary. It was a pleasure.” I turned and left.
He called “Hey!” in a deep voice.
Not glancing back, I strolled among the tables, aiming toward the only bright redhead in the crowd.
When I arrived, the words, “Ready for a drink?” were already on Patrick’s lips.
“Yes,” I said, checking that Bryan Flannigan had not followed me before we settled at an empty table away from the crowd. Patrick began medicating.
He didn’t speak much, and I didn’t press him. I crossed my legs and relaxed against my seat. In the distance, Mr. Flannigan turned around and spotted me. He stared then turned away. That was all. It was enough.
The stark differences between father and son struck me. Patrick remained but a child. In Cyrus’s black and white world of leaders and followers, he was a follower, specifically of pleasure. Unlike his father, unlike me, he was led by all things that provided relief. He was subject to emotion, surrounded by people who existed in a world he could not see because he did not understand personal reliability. Someone like me or Roth or his father would eat him alive. It was only a matter of time.
The crowd became quiet. A woman took the stage and summarized, using a PowerPoint presentation on the screen behind her, the past twenty years of accomplishments the various teams had made. A new antipsychotic with far fewer side effects and far better effectiveness had entered the market because of them. She spoke about an anti-inflammatory medication that caused fewer gastrointestinal issues and two new antibiotics their company had helped produce.
Patrick turned to watch and listen.
This was the moment. I reached into my coat pocket and retrieved the shimmery white rosary and set it on the plate in front of him. Patrick straightened and noticed it.
He did a double take. His face revealed a combination of shock, astonishment, and disbelief. For a long while, he froze, stuck in time. When he found his wits again, he looked at me.
“Holy shit!” he exclaimed. He picked up the rosary. “Is this… This can’t be…”
“You’re welcome.”
He slid his hand over the stones. “I don’t believe it.” His expression looked almost pained. “How did you…”
“You don’t want to know,” I said. “And I’ll never tell you.”
A grim look momentarily crossed his face, and he nodded. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
I beamed. “You know what would be really cool?”
“What?”
“If you could show me that machine. The one that turns things white. Is it around here?”
Patrick furtively looked around and said, “Shhh… Not everyone knows about that.” Satisfied no one had noticed us, he placed the rosary in his pocket. He grinned at me like I had just become his best friend in the world and nodded intimately. “Yeah, it’s here.” He rubbed his chin. “I think I could do that. It’d certainly be more interesting than this.”
I smiled back, just as intimately.
He stood, plucked a pink rose from the vase, and led me out of the room.
We marched out into the night. He held the rose in his left hand and looked at me with mischief in his eyes. “This way for a white rose.” He reached into his back pocket and retrieved a rectangular plastic card, a UPC code on it. His eyebrows wiggled back and forth. “A few sentences with my father was an easy price to pay. I palmed it off him.”
The night quieted as I stood there, not comprehending.
“So you can see the machine,” Patrick explained. “The one that bleaches the paint.”
I remembered Patrick leaning in toward his father, apparently becoming insulted, and walking away. But he had stolen the card then. I had underestimated him, after all. He was a child, but he had a few tricks up his sleeve.
“You think I didn’t figure out you’d want to see that machine? You think I thought you came all the way here just for my company?” He chuckled.
The tiniest sense of awe swept through me.
“You look so concerned.” He laughed, beckoning me. “Come on. It’s fine. I don’t care.” He sauntered off through the darkness.
I smiled. A few tricks indeed.
I followed.
CHAPTER 18:
BUILDING 1C
We walked perhaps two hundred feet before we arrived at a tall, windowless cream cement structure. Patrick was a few steps ahead of me. I glanced around to ensure we remained alone. The asphalt sparkled, empty.
Patrick led me around the right side of the building, pausing at a side door between one corner and the other. It was locked.
He inserted a silver key on the same ring as the white card into the lock and jiggled it. It would not turn. He cursed the key amiably, kicked the door, and tried it again. This second time, it revolved perfectly. He turned to me with a smile. “It’s a finicky lock.” He opened the door and held it for me. I stepped inside. He shut the door behind us and locked it.
We stood in a long, dim corridor with white plastic floor tiles, cream walls, and fluorescent lights. Half of the lights brightened. Half of them remained black. Patrick headed to the right. I followed.
“When we open the main room,” he said, “the alarm will go off. Derrick gave me the key code, though. Should be fine.”
I glanced at the end of the hallway and noticed two small black surveillance cameras on either side, positioned directly at us. My heart leaped. I pulled my jacket over my face. Tapping Patrick on the arm, I pointed to them.
He shrugged. “Nobody watches those unless they have to.”
I sighed, closed my eyes, and told myself that what was done was done. Even if I turned back, I couldn’t erase my image. More importantly, I didn’t want to turn back. I was too close to the machine beyond. I boldly peered up into the camera and made my decision.
I jogged to catch up with Patrick.
We followed the corridor approximately twenty-five feet. A glass door perched at the end. Through the glass, a dimly lit office. The flooring transitioned from light tile to dark carpet.
Patrick waved his key card in front of a small dark gray box, and the red light beside it turned green. The door unlocked, and he pulled it open. We both entered.
Patrick stepped between two desks, toward another door with a large window. Beyond the window, a massive, dimly lit chamber stretched high and wide.
“All right, so, I’ll open the door and we’ll walk inside, quick,” he said. “The alarm will go off, so I’ll have to run to the panel on the left and enter the code. If I memorized it correctly, we’ll be fine.”
“And if you didn’t?”
He shrugged. “What are they going to do to me? My father owns the fucking company.” He bookended the statement with another shrug.
So close to seeing Mr. Flannigan’s machine, I didn’t particularly care either way. It would be enough to get inside, see the thing, figure out if it was a box like Cyrus’s, and get out.
Patrick waved the key card in front of another gray plastic rectangle to the right of the door. A loud, heavy click sounded. The red light blinked green, and the door unlocked. Patrick inhaled a deep breath, as though about to dive into a large, deep pool of water and swim to the bottom. When he thrust the door open, the alarm immediately blared. The high-pitched wail cut through the air as all the fluorescent lights in the area illuminated brilliantly. Patrick bolted inside, and I followed. The door closed behind me, and the lock clicked automatically.
Patrick jogged along the rail to the left, his footsteps clanking against metal. He halted at an illuminated panel and entered numbers. As he did, I surveyed the place.
The ceiling stretched three stories high. The walls extended approximately ten car-lengths wide. The polished cement floor beneath the grated balcony on which I stood shined beneath the bright lights. To my left, a set of stairs descended.
Immediately, I looked for the contraption of which Patrick and Derrick had spoken. Across from me on the first floor, pallet upon pallet of uniform paint cans stretched along the back wall. The cans and the labels glared pure white. Near the cans sat a yellow forklift, and beside it a table supported stacks of paper.
Patrick yelled something. The alarm still shrieked, and its shrillness, initially a minor annoyance, increased. Pain bit deep inside my ear. Then, it cut off abruptly.
At last, blessed silence.
“Thank God,” Patrick said. He pressed a finger to his ear and bent over. The pink rose in his left hand lost a petal as it flopped forward. “Damn, that’s loud.” His voice echoed inside the facility.
I pointed to the petal beside his foot.
He smiled, bent gracefully, picked up the petal, and stuck it in his pocket. “This way,” he said.
I made my way across the balcony, my shoes clanging against the metal grating, and then we walked to a small alcove in the left corner of the room toward a doorless entryway with two glassless windows on either side. Inside, two swivel chairs sat across from a control panel.
A series of buttons and lights speckled the panel beside the door. Patrick’s right hand fluttered over them before he selected a lever on the left and flicked it up. The board illuminated, and a series of tiny beeps signaled as the system woke. Patrick pressed a button. From the center of the facility came a pop. I peered through the glassless window as a large rectangular structure just below the balcony opened like a claw, releasing what it grasped.
My mouth dropped. It was so...massive.
I stepped out of the alcove and stared. This was no clarinet-sized case. This was no gramophone. It loomed dark, minimal, wide, and tall, without decoration. No handles protruded. When closed, I noticed no seams. The edges of the doors looked sharp enough to cut wood. It was a simple structure, like a giant coffin on end, and it easily melded into the background behind the machinery.
I took the set of stairs nearest me down. Patrick trailed.
“So you just put whatever you want whitened in there,” he explained, “and then you run back to the control station and press the button marked B. The doors close. You wait five minutes. Then you press U.”
“Why five minutes?” I asked from the bottom of the stairs.
“Just because.”
When we reached the mechanism, I estimated that ten pallets of paint could potentially fit inside at one time. The open doors spread wide enough.
As I inspected the contraption, I noted there were no hoses inside. There was no drain, no electrical wires, no technology of any sort on the walls. In fact, it appeared to be simply four metal walls and a door.
“And how does it work?”
“I don’t know. Here...” He stepped inside and placed the pink rose on the floor of the contraption. The petals on the floor side flattened, and the others remained bowed on top. Patrick retreated a few steps. “Watch.”
He jogged back to the stairs and sprinted up them. As I stared at the rose, I sensed the slightest tingle of a distant emotion-laden memory. In my mind, Lutin’s dark face appeared in the night as he stood outside of Cyrus’s burning mansion. He smiled at me knowingly. And disappeared.
Patrick pressed the button labeled B. The walls closed in, and the structure sealed with a gentle puff. I stepped nearer and listened. No sounds emanated from the metallic structure—not a whirr or a beep.
I pressed my ear directly to the left wall. No hum.
During the five minutes we waited, Patrick remained in the control station, and I walked around the facility, glancing at the various stackers and other equipment. On my right, stacks of pure white cans and pallets towered.
It had been a long time since I had seen anything like it, except for the apple Derrick had shown me. Before the apple, my encounter with such unforgiving whiteness had been the rooms of Cyrus’s mansion that his red box had bleached. I felt both terror and nostalgia. I began remembering things I had stashed away. The dead rose I had first brought to Lutin. He had returned it to me, slipping it beneath the door where he had been locked and hidden away to be used by Cyrus. What had I brought him after he had resurrected the rose? A blanched piece of a curtain I had cut from one of the white rooms. And what had Lutin done to that piece of fabric? He had turned it blue and gold again.
I stood by the stacks of white cans and let my glance roam over them. I held my hand up and gazed at my fingers. After the rose turned white, could I make it pink again? Had Lutin given me that ability as well? I didn’t need to wait for the rose to find out.
Placing the tip of my finger on the edge of a can of paint, I released from within me a tiny shred of the power that let my body feel as though it were actually alive.
The paint can was no longer white. It beamed silver, and the colorful label announced deep crimson paint inside. Curious.
I marveled, my mouth an open O as I ran my fingers over the silver, over the red, over the black lettering and the cream background.
I tilted my head and retrieved a set of keys from inside my pocket. Glancing up the stairs to make sure Patrick wasn’t peeking over the balcony edge, I popped the lid open. It wasn’t the red of a perfectly mixed can of paint, but it certainly would be after a few swirls of a paint stick.
Oh, Mr. Flannigan, just what do you think you are doing?
“Nearly finished!” Patrick yelled from the alcove, waking me from my trance. I popped the lid down. Realizing how obvious the can would now be among the stack of white cans and white labels, I looked around for a place to hide it.
Something stopped me.
A small but definite sound whispered behind me, not unlike a piece of paper dropping. I turned.
Near the mechanism a small black hole appeared that had not been there before. A gap carved out the concrete, a tiny shadow that might lead to a bottomless chasm. I approached it, replaying the sound in my head, noticing the perfect symmetry. As I touched it, I discovered that it was not a black hole, though it appeared to be. On the floor rested a very dark piece of paper.
I searched the balcony overhead, and then the ceiling. I found no place from which the piece of paper could have fallen.
Cautiously, I retrieved the object. The weight of it was odd, the black darker than black. My thumb nearly disappeared into it. I flipped the slip of paper to its other side and noticed something written in gold, the gold shimmering from the page like a hologram. It reminded me instantly of the stones from his living machine Cyrus had shown me. Those stones had also featured gold lettering—the names of traitors.
The paper didn’t contain a name but an address. Bldg 1C concluded it. It was the place Patrick and I were.
Patrick yelled, “Stand back!” and I slipped the piece of paper into my pocket.
I stepped away from the mechanism, noticing for the first time that the left wall wasn’t completely smooth. On the left door I located a small opening, large enough for a piece of paper to slip through.
