Dark Static: A Novel, page 23
"A way to keep his dirty thoughts out," Kate hissed, nodding at Paul.
Paul rolled his eyes. "At any rate, this immune system functioned similarly to the blood-brain barrier, a system that allows only specific information in, but keeps unwanted matter out." He said this last with a glare at this sister.
"A walkie-talkie instead of a radio," Ethan said. "You control when the information is transmitted and received."
Paul looked impressed. "Not so thick, Sister."
"Once we figured it out, well," Kate said, "we thought why not give something else a go. See what we can do together."
Brother and sister had done just this in the years of their youth, developing and strengthening their conjoined abilities of mind. Always the siblings worked on bigger and more exciting abilities, always they kept their mind games to themselves in fear that they themselves would be feared and shunned more than their condition already engendered.
"Until one day," Paul said.
"We broke through," Kate said.
"We learned to Push," Paul said.
"That's what we call it," Kate added quickly. "Pushing!"
"If I had to compare it to anything," Paul said, "it would be the first ejaculation at the onset of puberty."
"Gross!" Kate moaned.
"It's really rather an apt comparison, Sister," Paul said. "A stirring of something unprecedented, a need that builds, a stumbling and fumbling around until, at last, something happens. It's sudden and shocking and a little messy, and the results change you forever."
"We built our first anti-room in our bedroom," Kate said in a small, girlish voice, as if she were admitting something dirty, a long kept secret she was somewhat ashamed of.
"We didn't have a clue what we'd done, at first," Paul said. "Naturally, it was terrifying. Beyond our ability to even comprehend."
"We stopped immediately," Kate said, shaking her head at the memory. "We were too scared to do that again."
"But eventually we did," Paul said. "Curiosity won out. And eventually we learned how to better control the power. What at first was simply one room Pushed into the nether became an entire house. Then we learned to harness the power, to Push things that were small."
"We pushed all sorts," Kate said, giggling.
"Our chair, the desk. The desk with items on it. Then just the stationery without the desk," Paul said proudly.
"We Pushed our goldfish bowl," Kate said.
"Alas, not the goldfish," Paul added.
"Then we learned to Push just the water," Kate said.
"But still not the goldfish," Paul said.
Ethan asked, "Why not the fish?"
"We're not sure," Kate said. "But it's the limitation of this 'gift'. No direct Pushing of living things."
"But we're all inside this trailer," Ethan said. "There's a potted plant over there, in the living room. Isn't that alive, too?"
"It's plastic, and it came with the trailer," Paul said. "Regardless, there's not a problem with things entering a superpositional state within an anti-room, we just can't Push them there independently."
"Why?" Ethan asked, knowing that in asking this question he was entertaining the notion that what the Slaters were saying was true.
Paul and Kate looked thoughtful for a while. Finally, Paul said, "We've discussed it, over the years. It comes down to this: Our gift is a result of an imbalance, an unfairness in the cosmos that has given rise to something that should not be. We don't get to make the rules, but we do play by them. And as such, our ability to directly Push a living creature into a superpositional state is denied us."
"Does that include yourselves?" Ethan asked.
They nodded. "Only Lock has that ability," Paul said. "We can only Push within the confines of a physical boundary, a room, a house."
"A single-wide in Jawbone," Ethan said.
"It's what gives Lock the edge," Kate said. "Makes him so dangerous."
"So, you're not qumans," Ethan said, looking at each of them.
"Only qumans have the power to exist in more than three-dimensions," Paul said. "They control reality, including their own physical bodies. Logically speaking, Mr. Dusk, anything follows a contradiction. Qumans are just that, living contradictions. They should not exist and yet they do. And for every quman violating the laws of space-time, there appears to be an answer, a response. A way to balance the equation. We call ourselves Equalizers."
"How did you find each other?" Ethan asked.
Just then, the front door opened. They all braced themselves. Mina whirled, sighting the gun on the entranceway. A flood of cassocked men filed into the kitchen, through the living room, black robes rustling as they spoke quickly in what sounded to Ethan like Italian. They filed into one of the back bedrooms, closing the door behind them.
"We don't have time for that now," Mina said, lowering the gun. "Lock knows I'm alive. We have to move."
"And go where?" Ethan asked. "Do what? How can we fight someone with this power?"
"Lock has affected us all, one way or another," Paul said. His eyes went to Mina, then back to Ethan. "We've each been touched by his cruelty and malice. We all want to stop him. But the Game is vast and non-intuitive. A direct assault usually plays in his favor. Subtlety and patience is our best strategy."
Ethan rose, tossing the compress on the table. "Screw subtlety, pal, and I'm fresh out of patience. We take this freak."
Kate almost squealed in delight.
Paul scowled.
Ethan turned to Mina. "Joey's my best friend. He pulled me out of the worst kind of darkness. They all did—Steve and Sam, Rusty and Jeanette, Tommy. I can't let them die. I won't let them die."
Paul, reddening, said, "With all your posturing you're likely to get them killed sooner than you think, and us too. Is that what you want?"
"Brother, he wants to help his friends," Kate said. "Rather heroic, if you ask me."
"Idiotic, is the word you're looking for, Sister."
Ethan ignored them. He faced Mina Cross as if waiting for a verdict from a judge. "How long have you been chasing him?" he asked her.
Mina's eyes flicked to meet his. The gun in her hand twitched. She looked at it, holstered it under her blazer, and grabbed her coat from the back of a chair.
"And where are you going?" Paul demanded.
"I can't stay here," Mina said, sliding into her brown overcoat. "Lock's already planning my next move. You're in danger."
"Bloody hell," Paul growled, putting his head in his hand.
"Take care of the place while I'm gone," Mina said. "Take care of yourselves. Come on, Mr. Dusk, we have a quman to catch."
Paul said, "Ethan, the tarot with the chemical structural formula—Temperance, was it? Do you still have it?"
Ethan reached into his pants pocket, pulled out the four tarot cards he had. He flipped through them until he found Temperance, the mysterious chemical formula printed on it, and handed it to Kate, who gave it to Paul.
"Let's see what the supercomputer can come up with," he said.
26
Mina insisted on driving.
Ethan rode shotgun, although he only had the 9mm pistol. The gun felt less like protection and more like a bad omen. He fought the urge to wind the window down and toss it out into the fog-swathed night. Could he kill Lock, even if it were the only choice left to him? Was it murder to save his friends? If a gun was useless against Judea Lock, then how could he win against such a monster? And what would it cost if he lost?
He turned to Mina and watched the 'special agent' drive. A heart-sick realization was brewing within, the cells of a proto-plan clumping together in his mind, like a blood clot. A way to end Lock's game. A way to disengage permanently from the freak's fantasy. A way to win.
Mina reached over and turned on the radio. The same incessant clicking they had followed earlier today filled the cab, but now it was so loud Mina turned the volume down.
"It's getting stronger," Ethan said.
She nodded.
"Is it him?"
"Maybe."
"Who else, if not him?" Ethan asked.
"Them."
Ethan fell silent. After a moment he said. "I saw Them, at the cabin."
"I know," Mina said.
"What are they?"
"Them."
"What are Them?"
"We don't know."
"Bullshit, you must know what they are, where they come from."
Mina said nothing.
"You're keeping this from me. Why?"
"What little you did see almost drove you mad," she said.
Ethan said nothing.
Mina turned onto Highway Twenty-Nine.
"Where to?" Ethan asked.
"Town," she said.
"Is that where the signal's leading you?"
"It's where the gas station is. You're almost out."
Ethan leaned over and looked at the dash. The gas light indicator glowed orange.
Jawbone appeared like a ship in the night, the Christmas lights twinkling, blinking, obscured by the whiteout and reinitialized into coruscating strings of primary colors that outlined the houses and storefronts in kaleidoscopic gaiety ill-fitting for a night as lugubrious as this.
After the dark of rural Highway 29, Ethan's eyes crackled with the tinsel-town look. The gas station was a few blocks farther. He kept getting the sense that figures, just out of sight in the roiling mists, were darting across the street, moving behind trees, slinking down alleys blanketed in gloom.
The architecture of Jawbone's tenuous suburbs ranged from Cape Cod to craftsman, with plenty of boxy cottages dotting the pine forests. The dot com billionaires and Silicon Valley and Bay Area diaspora had left their mark, too, with glass and steel mansions perched over Jawbone Lake, suspended in the forested hills like industrial spiders. These days, the old-money cedar and pine cabin estates were either tourist resorts or dilapidated ruins too expensive to bother renovating, hulking timber shrines to a bygone era, returning to the earth in slow stages and seasons.
Down here, where freshwater and alpine collided, where the tensions of tourist trap town and pioneer pride intertwined to form an inescapable economic noose, lived and worked the true denizens of Jawbone. Ethan knew them well, despite being an outsider, despite never really trying to fit in. He didn't fit in, but that was alright. They mostly left him alone, and those he did befriend had been those residents open and honest enough to admit that without the occasional injection of fresh genetic material a town's DNA was doomed to decay.
"This is it," Ethan said, pointing off to the left.
The gas station was a barge of lights in the dark river of the night. Despite the promise of sanctuary, the glowing red canopy exposed rather than shielded them from the darkness beyond. Mina slowed from fifty in a thirty zone, swung the truck across the oncoming lane without signaling, and bounced into the filling station.
Ethan looked out the passenger window. Although he could barely see the looming structure across the street, he knew that Big Willie's Bar & Grill was right there. The bar had never been a regular haunt for the Dusks, and since Jennifer's death Ethan had had little cause to frequent the place. Joey and Tommy hung out there often, ostensibly cruising for dates but more often than not to keep each other company. A sudden wave of nostalgia threatened to smother him. He looked away from the street.
Mina was eyeing him from the driver's seat.
"Something up?"
"Huh?"
"Something the matter?"
Ethan shook his head.
Mina held out her hand.
Ethan looked at it stupidly before realizing what the hand meant. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, handed her his credit card.
She stepped out and began the process of fueling. Ethan got out too, finding the cab somehow stifling. Boxes of diffused light moved along Main Street like phantoms; drivers who, for one reason or another, were drawn out into the swaddled night two days before Christmas, not to shop or even to make merry, but perhaps, Ethan thought, only to carry out prearranged orders, tarot cards in hand, poisoned instructions on what to do next, and all of it for his benefit, as if Ethan had been struck with the worst case of solipsism in history.
"I'm going to grab a candy bar, want anything?" Ethan asked.
Mina leaned against the truck bed like a cowboy against a saloon in a western, expressionless, watching the gas numbers tabulate. She handed him back his credit card and shook her head.
Ethan left her there. He wandered to the front door of the gas station convenience store. Inside, the bright overhead lights filled his brain with too much white. A cocktail of incense and Pine-Sol assaulted his nose. The Indian attendant behind the plexiglass nodded to him curtly. Ethan caught a look of his own face in the sunglasses rack mirror. A little puffy on the left side, but he hadn't bruised. A red mark near his cheekbone was the only serious indicator that he'd been in a fight, albeit with a trucker's boot.
He moved to the candy aisle and began to scour the shelves for a king-sized Snickers bar. He hadn't eaten anything since the generic brand toaster pastry. He grabbed two oversized bars and continued down to the bank of fridges that lined the back wall in search of an energy drink.
On his way back to the checkout, a man built like a small car and dressed in a black polo sweater, navy sports jacket and khakis with black combat boots bowled along the aisle towards him. Ethan, at first trying to give the small giant room to pass, realized the man's gaze was fixed on him. His small blue eyes and buzz cut skull, body-builder frame and Armani clothes gave the man the look of a pro-wrestler-turned fashion model or movie star.
"Mr. Dusk?" the man said in a voice that sounded ivy-league.
Ethan had no way to pass the man; he took up the entire narrow aisle, and unless he turned around and backtracked to the end of the store, he was trapped. "Uh, yeah?"
The man reached into his sports jacket and revealed a wallet badge and plastic card. The card had FBI printed on it in blocky blue letters.
Ethan's stomach lurched. He almost dropped the candybars and energy drink on the tiled linoleum floor.
"Special Agent Brood. Kindly accompany me for some questioning."
Ethan was stuck in the midst of fight or flight and froze. He realized, belatedly, that the 9mm Glock was still stuffed in the waistband of his jeans, the trigger guard snug against his belt buckle. Surely this fed knew this. Why hadn't he tossed the gun away the second he'd picked the damned thing out of the box?
The special agent appeared to notice Ethan's hesitation, maybe his calculation of the odds. He raised a massive hand, and said, "It'd be best if you came peacefully. We mean you no harm, and your life may be in danger."
Ethan swallowed. He raised his hands with the candy bars and drink, dropped them onto the nearest shelf, held out his hands.
Agent Brood shook his head. "Mr. Dusk, you're not under arrest. I'd prefer that I didn't have to cuff you. I'm trusting you to remain calm and logical and talk with us—just talk. Are we of a mutual understanding?"
Ethan thought that a mutual understanding with this Special Agent Brood was the moral equivalent of being on the same wavelength as a mutant alligator with an IQ of 150. Brood's almost reptilian stare belied his reasoned elocution. His body language was lingua franca between cop and civilian. Ethan was going nowhere without Brood. Choice was irrelevant, a ploy to allow him to believe this was his own idea, that he was not under duress, that he wanted to cooperate.
He lowered his arms. "Lead the way."
"I'll follow you, Mr. Dusk," Brood said. "And if you try to make a run for it, my partner, Agent Haki, is waiting outside. Just a friendly warning."
Ethan nodded. Agent Brood waved his arm for him to lead on, back the way he came. He did, and Brood followed behind like an immense shadow.
As they passed the door, the clerk said, "Thank you, have a nice day."
Ethan thought about pulling the sunglasses rack over, making a dive for the door, the street, the fog. He was glad he didn't the second he stepped outside. An even bigger man waited, black and wearing a white cashmere turtleneck. The white-gold earring in his left ear glinted with a set diamond. His sports jacket was black with navy slacks and brown Italian-leather shoes. His skin was almost as dark as his jacket. His bald head gleamed in the overhead marquee lights.
"Mr. Dusk, my name is Dick Haki, special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. My associate Agent Jim Brood and I would like to take you into our custody for a short time in order to ask you some questions."
It wasn't a request, it was a statement of fact. And Ethan had no way out. He tried to furtively glance at his truck, realizing bitterly that it was gone. Mina had bailed on him.
"Where is your vehicle, Mr. Dusk?" Brood asked.
Ethan glanced at the man. He felt like piggy-in-the-middle between two pro-football defensive tackles. "Uh, I walked here."
Brood and Maki exchanged a glance. Brood said, "Fine, Mr. Dusk, follow us." He raised his hand toward a black van parked on the street.
"You're kidnapping me?" Ethan said.
Brood smiled. It was alligatorous.
"Mr. Dusk," Agent Maki said in a voice even deeper than Brood's, a chunky gold necklace glimmering as he moved. "Please understand, we want only to ameliorate a troubling set of circumstances that have recently come to our attention. And while we remain reluctant to sequester your person or infringe upon your constitutional rights, it remains within our power to escalate this encounter, if you insist."
Sequester your person… Escalate this encounter. Ethan wondered how things could get any more surreal than they had in the past two days. "I'm armed," he said suddenly. "Handgun, front of my jeans, under my shirt."
"You can keep your weapon," Brood said, almost as a taunt.
In a way, the agent's offer for him to keep the gun was as neutralizing as a pair of handcuffs. They were so utterly unafraid of him, so unconcerned that he posed a threat to their lives, that even a loaded gun on his person didn't faze them.
