18th January, 5:32 PM
They climb the stairs to the porch. Next to the door, on a low table between a pair of high-backed chairs, is a cigarette-choked ashtray and a bong that looks as if it's been sitting outside for years. Without bothering to knock, the man who calls himself I enters the house. J follows him, removing his boots and passing down a short hall. On their right, seated in a cramped living room, they find a young man and woman eating a meal of fried noodles out of soup bowls.
"Hey," says the woman. The man who calls himself I glances at her and she returns her eyes to her food.
"Who's your friend?" the man beside her asks. He is wearing an over-sized t-shirt and a pair of black jeans spotted with paint. He blinks tiredly, setting his bowl down on the table with the lazy precision of an insomniac.
"Call me J," J tells him. The man nods dully.
"Richard, where's Taylor?"
"I guess he's in his room."
"Come on," says I. He turns from the room and a moment later J does the same. Neither Richard nor the woman on the couch watch them go.
They take the stairs to the landing on the second floor. Coming to the door at the end of the hall, I bangs heavily against the wood with a balled fist. A young man in dark sunglasses opens the door. A device like a fetish mask is in place over his mouth, its straps biting firmly into the soft flesh of his cheeks. He leans against the doorframe, absently brushing the side of his pants with the flat of his palm.
"Taylor," says I.
"It's you," the other replies, in the drawling tones of an old man; the disconnect between his voice and body hits J like a brace of cold water. Up to this point he has followed I blindly, trudging along in his wake without comment, his thoughts as blunted as wet clay. Now he is awake, aware both of his surroundings and the pain of his body. From behind his opaque lenses, J can feel the man with the voice modulator, Taylor, staring at him.
"You'd better come in," Taylor says. "Your big friend too, if he wants."
Stepping back, he shifts his weight on his heel and holds the door open. Behind him is a dark room, the windows shaded by heavy curtains. On a desk strewn with used food wrappers and unwashed dishes, three computer screens provide some scant light. Clothes are scattered across the carpet, a large pile of them lying in the corner like some homeless man, huddled against the cold.
"Why are we here Taylor?" I asks.
"Your voice is different."
"And I didn't even need a modulator."
Taylor laughs warmly.
"There's someone you should meet," he says, bending down to pick up an old t-shirt. Idly, he lobs it across the room. There is a brief stirring, and J sees that what he took to be a pile of clothes is actually a man wrapped in a blanket, sitting with his knees drawn up to his chin. Slowly, he raises his head. All at once he seems to shudder. With a great effort he brings himself to his feet. The blanket slithers from his chest and down the front of his legs to settle on the floor.
He takes a step forward, and then another, slowly drawing himself into the shallow light of the screens. Like everyone J has met so far in this house, he is young, with fine, dark features and a shaved head of black hair. There is nothing unusual about him, unless it is the dullness around his eyes and the heavy way he has of moving, as if he'd been sleeping in that corner for hours, but seeing him clearly for the first time, I backs away, his face hardening.
"The line," he says. The young man stops walking. He is caught in the act of smiling, a row of white teeth showing from behind his lips. He brings a hand to his face, tracing a line from his forehead through his right eye, and down the side of his cheek. As far as J can see, there is nothing there.
"This?" he says. "Just noticed it myself."
"I know you," mutters I. "We met on the porch. Your name is Coulter."
The young man shrugs.
"You can call me Luke."
"But not just Luke."
"No," he says, hesitating. Again he touches his hand to his face, tracing the invisible line. Standing with his back to the wall, J closes his eyes; his body feels like that of a much older man's, aching, and full of regret.
"Someone mind tellin me what the fuck is goin on?" he asks.
"Taylor," says I. "You have any powder?"
Taylor waves his arm at the dresser next to the bed, and I spends some time rooting around in the topmost drawer before producing a plastic bag. He holds it up and tosses it at J, who catches it out of the air. Hefting its weight in his palm, J guesses there is enough powder here to dose everyone in the house for a month.
"You never wanted to take the powder," the man called I tells him. "I know that. Never felt the need. But tonight at least you'd better. It'll be easier."
J shuts his eyes, suddenly exhausted; he can hear it clearly now, C's voice coming from this stranger's mouth, or something like C's voice, an approximation close enough to the real thing that it makes no difference. He has heard it before, but he shut his mind to that, and everything it might have meant. He is drained, and the constant throb of pain at the back of his head and the raw skin at his neck threaten to overwhelm him. He knows that if he stopped now, sat down on the floor or on the bed, he would not be able to rise again. The only thing keeping him on his feet is the knowledge that he won't stop, or that he can't, because nothing is finished yet; what began when the two agents dragged him from bed and set to torturing him is still taking place, and he has no choice except to see it through.
They should have finished me off when they had the chance, he thinks, and plunging his hand into the bag, he swallows a mouthful of powder. The metal tang of blood hits his tongue: blood and a hint of decay, as if the stuff had been cut with rotten fruit. J waits for something to happen, a sudden rush or change in his perception, but there is nothing. His eyes are closed, and his back is flat against the wall. The sound of a creaking mattress reaches him as someone sits down on the bed.
"Something happened," says the man named Luke, his voice seeming to reach J from a long way off. "Last night, or maybe the night before. I can't remember. I was here though, in this house. In the kitchen. I was washing dishes, and I was looking at the window in front of the sink. Then I felt it, something. A tremor, and I dropped the plate; my reflection was wrong in the glass. It was someone else's reflection, only for a moment, and then he was gone. But then tonight with Taylor and these mushrooms it all came back… His name was Ward."
J looks at him. From his forehead to his cheek, the right side of the young man's face is cut by a yellow line. Standing next to the bed is the man called I, and there is also a line on his face, more faded perhaps, but still clear enough, and running straight as the incision of a scalpel.
"What are they?" J asks.
"A symbol," I tells him.
"That's one way to put it," says Luke.
"I told you about the accident in the mines," I goes on. "Told you that C fell into the pit. But there was more to it than that."
"A blue light," Luke blurts out, looking about the room as if seeking confirmation.
"I don't know what the Institute was building there," I continues. "But something went wrong. Maybe they thought they had a gate, a door to wherever it is the outsiders come from, but it didn't take C anywhere. When he fell, he just wound up here."
He presses a finger to his temple. His face is nothing like the man J knew, but the mask is there, and from his mouth the echo of his friend's voice. For a second he appears ready to say something more, but instead he turns to the young man on the bed.
"You have Ward's memory?" he asks.
"Pieces."
"All I need is a way to find Auld."
"Auld," he says. "Why?"
"I'm looking for the agents."
"From the Institute?"
"We'd like a word," says J. Luke seems to consider that, and then he smiles.
"Wouldn't mind a word myself," he concedes.
"So you'll help us?"
"Yes, and I can do one better than just
telling you where Auld is."
The car is crowded. Luke is up front, driving in silence, and beside him in the passenger seat is the man called I. J and Taylor are crammed together in the back. None of them are speaking, and J is content to watch the street through the window, the passage of store-fronts and apartment blocks, the odd person walking in the frigid night.
Using Ward's memory, Luke told them about the raid, likely the same one that R had mentioned earlier, but unlike R, he had known that it was tonight, and where it was going to be. The fact that Luke dredged this information out of a dead alien's memory is not something J is prepared to think about. The less he thinks the better, for which reason he is grateful for the numbing fatigue that has settled on him in the last hour; his head continues to ache, and there is the pain of his throat where the agent put the taser to him, but the passage of time has made these both bearable. Knowing that he is being driven toward the agents now, and putting himself in a position to absorb the same kind of punishment again is far more pressing. He sighs, and watches his breath briefly mist against the window. He tries to tell himself that it doesn't matter, that nothing the agents or anyone else can do to him now will make a difference, content in the certainty that he didn't have a choice, not once he accepted that it was C's voice coming from this other man's throat; J glances at him now, thinking again how different he is from the person he knew, a thin, pale man with two days' worth of stubble and a yellow line cutting his face from forehead to cheek.
J leans back, and would laugh if he had the energy; it's not as if he had any big plans for the rest of his life. He knows who and what he is, a Northside drug dealer, and more useful, probably, for his size than anything in his head. He is aware of how that story plays out, watched the dealers who came up before him, all of whom are now either dead or in jail, or else still dealing, but every year with less conviction, as if playing the game for so long had robbed them of something essential, a solidity or concreteness that, once gone, is lost forever. And tonight he too could wind up dead, but that fact, more of an abstract concept than complete thought, is thankfully bled of its immediacy. Despite it all, everything that's happened to him in the span of a few narrow hours, J feels good. There is a stillness about him, a sensation akin to standing alone in the center of a dark room. Just before him is a wall, and he knows that very soon now he will be passing to the other side.
Partially reflected in the window glass, Taylor leans toward him.
"You alright there?"
"Just thinkin this might not have been such a good idea."
Taylor laughs.
"You worry too much."
Before J can respond, Luke turns the car from the main road onto a narrow laneway. Here, they are only two or three blocks away from the water, a post-industrial wasteland of run-down warehouses and deserted, gravel-strewn lots. Slowly, Luke pulls up to the curb. On their left is a two-storey warehouse. A yellow light shows in a window on the first floor, and parked on the opposite side of the road is a white, unmarked van.
"That's theirs," J announces.
"Yeah?" I asks him.
"Spent some time this mornin gettin acquainted with it."
"Alright."
He opens his door, and one by one they exit the car. From the back of his jeans, Taylor removes a pair of wire-cutters and sets to work ripping a hole in the high, chain-link fence that surrounds the building. J crouches beside him, aware of the two others at his back. His breathing is even, and the night is a single, unbroken plane; at the end of the alley is the white halo of a street lamp, and from somewhere in the distance comes the sound of a car alarm. J tenses, but there is no sign of movement, and Taylor is already pushing through the hole. J follows after him, with I and Luke trailing just behind. For J, the noise of their passage is horribly magnified, each misstep or crunch of gravel under an unwary foot as distinct and lacerating as the shot of a gun. He keeps his eyes trained on the yellow square of the window, and soon the four of them are next to the wall.
J breathes deeply on the cold air. Taylor is already moving off, while I and Luke seem unsure what to do, both of them standing with their backs pressed to the bricks. Straightening, J cranes his neck to peer through the window.
On the far side is what might be the floor of an old factory. Dozens of flat tables stretch from one wall to the other in neat, parallel rows. One of them, not far from the window, is piled high with bags of what J can only assume to be powder. As he looks on, a man backs into J's field of vision.
The man is tall, and well-built, dressed in a leather jacket and jeans. His hands are raised, as if he were holding someone off, and a moment later the two agents appear. J watches, his mind dulled, as the man in leather wrenches a gun from the back of his pants. As if from nowhere, two prongs sprout from the man's throat, and he drops to the floor in a twitching pile of limbs. J staggers away from the window, cursing under his breath.
"What is it?" I asks.
"They're here," J announces. "And one other guy they just took out with a taser."
Taylor is next to him.
"I found a way in," he says, his voice nearly lost in a haze of static. He does not wait for them to answer, already moving off in the direction of a service door not five meters from the window. J begins to feel that he has been here before, possibly dozens of times.
"Stay behind me," Taylor mutters. He twitches his head to one side and the air shivers in response; the hairs on the back of J's neck prick up, and it is all he can do not to stuff a finger in his ears. Taylor pulls on the door handle and strides into the warehouse with a shattering, digital howl; even from outside the noise is head-splitting, and J clutches his ears, watching in an odd, ringing silence as the agents fall to their knees, their mouths prised open in silent cries. Abruptly, the noise cuts out: J is already rushing into the room, setting on the older man with a series of vicious kicks to his stomach and chest. Dazedly, the agent attempts to fight him off, but J pulls him onto his back, his fist connecting with the man's goggles in a thunderous crack; a stab of pain shoots up the length of his arm, but still J goes on, watching his fist fall and rise and fall again, until all at once he is lifted into the air and sent flying across the room.
A low, electric humming, and the warehouse roof swimming in front of J's eyes; somehow, he pulls himself to his feet. The air is thick with an orange fall of powder, and all around him bodies are strewn about the floor: a bomb, J thinks. Not far away the smaller agent is also standing, smiling at him from a battered, blood-streaked mouth.
"Latest technology," he says, patting the clasp of his jacket. In his other hand is a taser.
A shot rings out, and the taser clatters to the ground. The agent's hand is pressed to his stomach, where a network of small, red lines are blossoming between his fingers. He falls to his knees. Standing behind him, the gun still smoking in his hand, is the man in the leather jacket.
Taylor is already on his feet, while I is busy raising Luke from the ground. The taller agent is lying on his back. The man in leather looks from one person to the other, and then at J, the gun moving between them all, but thoughtlessly, as if he was unaware of holding it. Slowly, he begins to back toward the door, stopping long enough to prod a ruptured bag of powder with the tip of his boot. He swears under his breath, and then he is gone.
J is the first to react, crossing the short distance to the taller agent and catching his wrist before he has a chance to reach the clasp of his jacket.
"Don't," J tells him.
"Well this is a surprise," murmurs the agent, almost to himself, and then, looking at J: "Good for you. The way you were screaming this morning, I thought we'd broken you."
The punch sends the man's head snapping back; he collapses to the floor, and J lets go of his wrist, ripping the jacket from his shoulders and tearing the goggles off his head. Where the lenses had been, the agent's exposed skin is pallid and unhealthy looking, his small eyes like those of a frightened animal.
There is a rancid taste in J's mouth, and enough pain in his right hand that he is sure it must be broken. He looks at the corpse of the smaller agent lying a few feet away. It seems a small, pale thing, and J spits, rubbing his aching hand.
"You boys go on," he mutters.
"You're sure?" It is C's voice, but J does not turn to see the man using it.
"Yeah. Have some things ta discuss with my friend here."
He bends toward the taller agent, only dimly aware of the others leaving the room. The agent shrinks away, his hands scratching helplessly at the powder scattered over the floor.
"You ever get the feelin you've just about run out a'time?" J asks.
"Every day," the man says. He is still smiling as J's hands close around his throat.