Shattered Sky

  Winston had seen Drew only once since the collapse of the dam. It was back in July. Drew had sought out Winston that time, finding him in the remains of his overgrown Alabama neighborhood, where few people lived anymore and the wrecks of homes stood overwhelmed by vines, like a Mayan ruin. Winston’s effect in action.

  “I want to put some closure on all of this,” Drew had told him on the buckling boards of Winston’s front porch. No longer under Michael’s influence, Drew’s nature seemed . . . well, much more natural. He had come all the way to Alabama to tell Winston how Michael and Tory had died, for he felt Winston deserved to know. According to Drew, they were caught in the dam the moment it gave way, most likely buried under thousands of tons of rubble. So it was a shock when Drew called weeks later to tell him that Michael had, indeed, been discovered—and in the desert, no less—a few miles from the fallen dam. How he got there was a mystery that Michael had taken to his grave. As for Tory, her remains were still unaccounted for.

  The muffled sound of pounding waves resonated in the narrow Newport Beach alley. Winston stepped out into full view as Drew approached the U-Haul with a box. Drew saw him and set down the heavy box in the back of the open truck. If he was surprised to see Winston, he didn’t show it.

  “You missed the funeral,” Drew said.

  “I’ve got a problem with cemeteries.”

  Drew considered that. “They grow on you.”

  Winston dredged up a grin. “Yeah, that’s the problem.”

  Winston found himself gazing off at some Bermuda grass poking through the cracks in the pavement. It was already growing fast and furious like the kudzu back home, new shoots sprouting before his eyes. Most of the time he chose not to look. He had long since dispensed with worrying about the things that were beyond his control.

  Michael’s father came out carrying a lamp in each hand. He was a man of forty-five, prematurely gray but in good physical condition, as Michael had been. He seemed to be bearing up well under his grief. He nodded a hello to Winston, and looked to Drew. “Friend from school?”

  “Yeah, you could say that,” Drew said.

  Mr. Lipranski put the lamps in the back of the truck. “Take a break if you want, Drew. We’ve got all day.” He went back inside.

  “I’m helping him move,” Drew said. “He could afford it back when Michael was selling his services, but not now.” Drew leaned against the side of the rental truck, wiped some sweat from his brow, then reached into a cooler and handed Winston a Dr. Pepper. “Any word from Dillon or Lourdes?”

  “Still AWOL.”

  “Both of them?”

  Winston nodded.

  “Do you think they’re together?”

  Winston popped his tab, feeling the fine spray graze his face. He shrugged. “I doubt it. I’ve got some hunches where Lourdes might be, but no clue about Dillon.”

  While Lourdes had strode into the sunset the day the dam broke, Winston had kept in close contact with Dillon . . . until the day Dillon just up and disappeared six months ago, leaving Winston alone to watch all of Dillon’s prophetic predictions come true. Shifting alliances; breakdown of communication; a plague of apathy, the dissolution of reason. And where are you now, Dillon? We’ve found Michael’s body—where the hell are you?

  Since the old times were not worth catching up on, Winston got to the point. “I’d like you to show me where Michael is buried.”

  Drew put down his empty can. “Why? You gonna fill out his ivy?” Winston frowned, scalded by the remark. “I’m sorry,” said Drew. “I didn’t mean to say that. It’s just—” He reached up and flicked a droplet from his eye that could have been sweat, but was most likely a tear. “It’s not far from here. Let me finish up, and I’ll take you.”

  CORONA DEL MAR MEMORIAL Park was a piece of land with a gorgeous ocean view.

  “It’s up here,” Drew said as they trudged up the gentle slope. “There weren’t many plots left for sale. It’s a popular spot.”

  It struck Winston as odd that such a view would be wasted on residents with no windows to appreciate it. Best to be entombed like Snow White, in a casket of glass facing west to catch the rays of the setting sun.

  They stopped by a rectangular patch of earth surrounded by other occupied graves—older ones with well-trimmed hedges and low granite headstones. Michael was buried among strangers. It was a modest grave. Still unmarked, with sorry plugs of ivy that had yet to take root.

  “No gravestone yet?” questioned Winston.

  “Not yet. And his father isn’t even sure he wants one.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ever been to Paris?” Drew asked. “Ever see Jim Morrison’s grave?”

  Winston had never seen it, but he knew enough to get Drew’s point. It was a counterculture shrine, the area around it defaced by graffiti and spoiled with litter. The names of the shards were known now in just about every corner of the world, and whether or not they were considered mere servants of Dillon, fanatics were everywhere. For the same reason Winston had to travel under an assumed name, the marked grave of Michael Lipranski would never see any peace.

  He noted the sad, forlorn way Drew looked at the grave. For a moment he wished he had Dillon’s skill at divining a person’s thoughts and feelings. “Were you and Michael lovers?” he asked.

  Drew shook his head. Even without Dillon’s power, Winston could read a whole canvas of emotions there. “More of an unrequited love thing,” Drew said. “At least for me. He wasn’t into it.”

  “I shouldn’t stay too long,” Winston said. “I’ve got to follow a lead that might bring me to Lourdes.” Winston gave Drew his cell phone number. “If you find Dillon, let me know.”

  “I won’t find him,” Drew said. “I’m not looking.”

  Winston lingered a few moments more.

  “Did you just want to pay your respects?” asked Drew, clearly uncomfortable to be at his friend’s grave so soon after he was laid to rest. “Or is there another reason why you came?”

  Winston knelt down to the grave. “I don’t know.” He reached his hand down to touch the earth, and for an instant the dream flashed through his mind again like a static shock.

  A lavender lounge chair.

  A ledge.

  Three figures.

  Why have I come here, Michael? I’m not Dillon, I can’t give you back your life. What is it I’m supposed to do? But Michael’s grave, like all graves, gave its answers in variations of silence. His only course now was south, following the solitary lead that might take him to Lourdes.

  By the time they left a few minutes later, Michael’s ivy was green and lush, and Winston’s mind was still a dry heave, willing him to action against a painful absence of purpose.

  4. LOST HORIZON

  * * *

  TRANSCRIPTION EXCERPT, DAY 202, 13:51 HOURS

  “I’m worried about Lourdes. Winston’s fine out there—but I don’t think things are right with her. I think she got pushed off the brink, and never came back.”

  “How much damage could she do on her own?”

  “Lots, if she chose to. When I last saw her, she could put a room of people to sleep, or turn them into a kick-line, hopping in time against their will. We called her the puppeteer, and she hated it. But now there’s no telling how many she’s got on the end of her strings.”

  “If she hasn’t surfaced, maybe she won’t. There’s a good chance the government has her, like they have you, and are hiding her in some other secret installation.”

  “No. When I’m out there in the tower I can feel her somewhere out there. And it scares me.”

  THE CRUISE SHIP WAS never actually reported missing. Monarch cruise line simply listed the S.S. Blue Horizon as out of service, but rumors abounded. Rumors that it had vanished in the Bermuda Triangle; that it broke apart in a storm; that it was torpedoed by friendly fire. The truth, however, was much simpler, and slightly more embarrassing to Monarch Cruises. Simply put, the eighty-thousand-ton cruise ship had been seize
d by pirates.

  Winston Pell had kept his ear to the ground for many months in search of such anomalous events, which was no easy task, because over the past year, daily life had evolved into one anomalous event after another. Riots springing up unprovoked, stocks fluctuating so violently that analysts were jumping out of windows. There was a surge in the number of militant religious zealots, as well as rampant hedonism popping up in the most straight-laced of bible-thumping towns.

  And all because everyone could sense that the world had suddenly become a sinking ship. What began with the Backwash had taken on a momentum all its own, metastasizing to the far reaches of the globe. There was a prevailing, unnameable sense that something immense and terrible was about to occur. Winston suspected people had a kind of species instinct about it, the way dogs could sense a coming earthquake.

  And so on the police bands, and in the media, and in the chat rooms, Winston searched for any anomalous event that was simply too anomalous to be anything but Dillon, or Lourdes.

  Finally he narrowed his sights down to the S.S. Blue Horizon. As maritime industries were not immune to the decay of social structure that marked these days, the Blue Horizon was not the first large vessel to fall victim to latter-day pirates. Everything from freighters to river boats had gone missing. What made the Blue Horizon different, however, is that it was the only ship that defied being brought to justice. The ship would come into various ports, from Juneau to Jamaica, in the middle of the night for fuel and supplies, appearing like the flying Dutchman, only to be gone by morning—which was theoretically impossible, because every port was manned with a night crew. Yet every port gave the same story—no sooner had the ship arrived, than the night crew fell asleep at their posts. When they awoke, the ship was gone.

  As Lourdes had a very special knack for rendering whole groups of people unconscious, news of this particular ghost ship was of special interest to Winston.

  It was on a Saturday in October that Winston drove a rented car across the Mexican border to Ensenada. The word was that the Blue Horizon had anchored off shore, staying put for the first time in many months.

  As he drove along the coast, past a smattering of Ensenada resorts, he could see the great ship, half a mile off shore. He parked by the docks amidst a bazaar of trinkets and curios, where tourists from the other two ships in port bargained for deals. Most locals and tourists, fairly oblivious to the Blue Horizon’s presence, went about their business. It was when Winston tried to get a tender to take him out to the ship that he began to encounter resistance. The fishermen and boatmen would shake their heads when he asked, but offered no explanation, until he finally found one who would talk; the driver of a glass-bottom boat, docked too far from the ships in port to see any action.

  “No, my friend,” the boatman said. “I don’t go out there. She is La Llorona—the wailing woman. A ghost ship.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I know all the ships that come in: Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Celebrity. But this one. She not supposed to be here.”

  Winston pulled out his wallet and fanned out the corners of several bills. “Dime lo que sabes,” he said in perfect Spanish, “y te pagaré por la informaçíon.” The boatman was caught off guard. Not necessarily by the money, but by the accent. Winston smiled knowingly. People were always surprised when he spoke their language, whichever language that happened to be.

  The boatman then gazed forlornly at his glass-bottom boat. Business had obviously been slow. The man stared at the money in Winston’s hand, then sighed. He shoved the bills in his pocket. “Yesterday, four men from the cruise line come in by helicopter,” he explained. “Fancy suits, very important-looking. A friend of mine, he takes them out there, and as soon as they get near the ship, three of them pass out cold, like someone poisoned them or something. The one man left—he is the one they let on the ship. My friend waits and waits in his boat, but the man doesn’t come back, and the other three, they don’t wake up. Then he hears the man screaming on the ship, he doesn’t wait anymore. He comes back, goes home.”

  “And the other three men?”

  The old man shook his head. “The hospital. Still they don’t wake up.”

  Winston pulled out a roll of bills, and handed the boatman a twenty, but kept his billfold out. “How much for you to take me out there?”

  The boatman shook his head. “I told you—I don’t go out there.”

  Winston slowly began flipping twenties. “You’re telling me you’re afraid?”

  The boatman began to scratch his beard stubble, thoughtfully at first, and then nervously, as the number of bills increased. “It’s drugs. Some drug lord took over that boat. You go out there, he cuts your throat—maybe mine, too.”

  “I thought you said it was haunted.”

  “That, too.”

  Winston had flipped four bills, he flipped a fifth to make it an even hundred. The boatman began to sweat. “¿Estas loco, eh?”

  Winston flipped another bill. The boatman took one more glance at his passengerless boat, and sighed. He took the money, and let Winston on board.

  They pulled away from the port, leaving behind the commotion of tourists. The sea was calm, and although the glass-bottom boat wasn’t the fastest vessel, Winston was grateful for the time it gave him to prepare for what he might find. As they got closer and closer to the white behemoth, Winston could hear music growing louder as they drew nearer. Upbeat salsa. Cruise music. The kind of music that summoned images of streamers and balloons, and drunk couples sweating a hot lambada. He could see people on deck now, leaning on the guard rails. Bathing suits, sun hats, and everyone seemed to have a drink in their hand.

  “If that’s haunted, the ghosts must be having a hell of a time,” said Winston. The boatman reserved judgment.

  The ship loomed before them now, a massive thing that just kept growing as they got closer. The anchor was down, but the lower gangway doors were all closed. “No way on, my friend,” said the boatman.

  “Go around a few times.”

  Reluctantly the boatman turned the wheel, and began to circle the great ship.

  Winston moved out to the center of the boat, where he could be seen from the Horizon’s deck. It also made him a target, but he was willing to take that chance. The boat circled twice, and by the time they came around to the starboard side for the second time, the aft lower gangway door was opening.

  “Now they kill you,” said the boatman. He set his engine to an idle, and they coasted to the gangway door. Just inside, two unusually corpulent crewmen greeted them with disapproving frowns.

  “She says you’re not welcome here,” barked one of them.

  Winston grinned in triumph. So he was right—it was Lourdes! “Tell her she owes me five minutes of her time.”

  “I suggest you turn your boat around, and go back where you came from.”

  The boatman looked first at the guards, then at Winston. His eyes were pleading.

  The men wore earpieces. Winston guessed that they must have been getting their orders straight from the horse’s mouth. He wondered if Lourdes could hear him as well.

  “Tell her,” said Winston, raising his voice, “that she’s a stubborn bitch without a shred of sense.”

  The boatman took a deep breath and crossed himself. The crewmen hardened into a battle stance, and then a voice came down from heaven.

  “Fine. Let him on.”

  Winston looked up in time to catch a glimpse of Lourdes looking down on him from the railing seven decks above, before she backed out of view.

  The two-man welcome wagon wasn’t thrilled about it, but they obeyed their orders, reached out and helped him aboard.

  Winston turned to tell the boatman not to wait, but he was already pulling away.

  The two overweight crewmen led him to a glass elevator in a six-story atrium of brass rails and polished marble. He passed several stewards on his way, noticing the air of despair that pervaded their eyes. They, too, were obe
se—so much so that they bulged painfully out of their uniforms. He looked at the ample gut of one of his escorts. “Cruise food?”

  The escort said nothing.

  As soon as they stepped out onto the pool deck, the weighty sense of oppression permeating the lower decks was blasted away by a party that stretched from stem to stern on the ship’s open-air decks. It was a fiesta of slim, beautiful people. The pool deck was a contagion of indulgence. On a dance floor past the pool, at least a hundred people sated their senses to the beat of the brightly frilled band, which, in spite of a cool ocean breeze, kept insisting it was “hot-hot-hot.” Gorgeous women in designer bathing suits that left nothing to the imagination sipped tall cocktails in every color of a neon spectrum. The beat of the music pulsed in the teak wood of the deck, and whoever wasn’t dancing was luxuriating on lounge chairs, or partaking of a sumptuous buffet. The atmosphere was so intoxicating, Winston forgot for a moment why he had come. Until he saw her.

  Lourdes sat on her own private verandah one deck up, with a grand view of the partying pool deck below.

  Pushing past the gyrating bodies on the dance floor, he made his way toward her, noticing that among the perfect physiques on this pleasure cruise were reminders of that other class that inhabited this ship. A towel boy with an unpleasant bloat about him, lumbering like a troll on the perimeter of the deck. A worker polishing the brass railings with turgid limbs and fleshy folds, his body drenched in acidic, malodorous sweat. These were members of a bizarrely obese servant class that greased the machine, and kept Lourdes’s movable feast afloat.

  Winston climbed to Lourdes’s private deck perch. She reclined on a plush lounge, and was attended to by two topless men with pectoral muscles the size of turkey breasts. Although she saw Winston approach, she made no attempt to acknowledge him. She simply waited for him to come to her. She had never looked better. Not exactly svelte—her frame would never allow that—but shapely, and well-contained within the smooth satin of her bathing suit. He now noticed that the two dark-haired, dark-eyed glamour boys who attended her were, in fact, twins. They threw him a disinterested gaze before returning to their duties. One rubbed Lourdes with tanning oil, the other dipped shrimp in cocktail sauce and held them to her lips.