Secret Dead Men (24 page)

"Not-gonna-happen," Fieldman said in a sing-songy voice.

"Where's Paul?" Doug asked.

"Paul is dead," I explained.

"That was a goddamned hoax," a voice from the back cried out. "You've been listening to that Walrus song too much."

"Shut up, Tom," somebody else said.

"Tell me one thing, buddy-boy." It was Special Agent Kevin Kennedy. I hadn't spoken to him for eight months. He'd been lounging in his own retirement resort ever since I'd gotten him--or at least, his memory--in serious trouble with the Feds. Maybe his keen, analytical mind had noticed something important, something I'd overlooked.

"What's that?" I asked.

"How long before we all die and get out of this weird mental hell?"

I decided to go back to ignoring him.

Fieldman looked over the crowd of worried souls and lifted his arms like a priest giving a blessing. "Becalm yourselves! You must realize all of this is a computer simulation programmed to contain your immortal souls! We do not exist in real time! We are in no danger!"

"Shut up, asshole"--or a similar sentiment--was the collective reply.

I checked the lobby screen. A crowd of magazine staffers and drunken lawyers and floozies from steno pools across Center City--basically, anybody with an excuse to be here--started pouring down the stairs. Among them was Leah, who took one look at our bleeding body, then kept walking, a tiny smile on her face.

It was a surreal moment. A crowd of souls in an artificially-constructed hotel lobby within a single human brain, watching a crowd of the living--completely unaware they themselves were being watched--mediated by the body of a man with a massive head wound. I would have spent time pondering it, had my body not been fading away so fast.

* * * *

Some of the
Philadelphia
magazine staffers--you could tell by the colored name stickers--started a debate on how to help the poor man who seemed to have been shot in the head. One in particular started to poke around authoritatively. "Alright--move back, people. I know what I'm doing. Somebody call 911? Somebody call NOW, please!"

"Don't bother, pal," said Kennedy. "We're toast. We've bitten the bag and squirted wet shit."

The magazine guy started foraging around in our jacket, and finally managed to fish a wallet from our jacket. He started flipping through my forged IDs, and finally settled on one--my fake driver's license. "Let's see here. Okay. Who are ya?" the man said to himself. "Hmm. Del Winter. Says you're a power company employee."

A woman piped up: "God, Tim, shouldn't we move him or something?"

"You can't," said Tim. "You're likely to paralyze him. Now, we've got to keep the body still until the paramedics arrive. Speaking of, has somebody called 911 yet? I mean, for Pete's sake, our friend..." He looked at my ID again. "...our friend Del here is losing quarts by the second."

A bloody hand reached up and wrapped around the license. Tim's eyes widened. Brad was still alive, for the time being.

But perhaps he wasn't reaching for the license after all. I saw another face peek from behind the crowd of magazine staffers. It was Alison.

"She was shot," I said, mostly thinking out loud more than anything else. "How can she stand there like that?"

"You seem to forget: she's been reborn into a cyborg body," said Fieldman.

"A what?"

"Android, robot--whatever word you care to use. Surely, you know this. You arrived at the party inside her."

Indeed, I did know. Alison's lips trembled as she tried to move closer. Tim's bushy black hair obscured part of her face, but Alison's eyes remained transfixed. Her bright, blue eyes.

Oh God. Now I knew why Fieldman was acting smug.

"Brad, don't!" I shouted, even though I was nowhere near the lobby mike. "Don't do it!" Maybe my anguish would transmit through the pulpy brain and shattered skull into his consciousness. Either way, it wouldn't matter. Because Brad did it.

He jumped into Alison's body. He even looked right back down at us, and winked, with Alison's face.

I felt the conscious presence leave immediately. The house lights dimmed, as if there were a sudden power shortage somewhere else in the world, and electricity was being sucked away to be shared elsewhere. The lobby screen went blank.

"I'll be with you always," Fieldman said apropos of nothing, and vanished from our sight.

Leaving the rest of us inside our dying body.

* * * *

Remember how I was complaining about being trapped in a toilet? A fate worse than death, right?

I was wrong. There is something worse.

* * * *

The moment Fieldman vanished, the metal gizmo that had affixed me to the floor vanished, too. I was a free man. Wowee. A free man, trapped in a soon-to-be corpse.

Kevin Kennedy slapped me on my soul-shoulder. "I guess this brings the case to a close, doesn't it, buddy? I always knew somebody would get the better of you. Hell, this is the happiest day of my life. Or should I say death?"

"Nobody's dying," I said. "I mean, not permanently."

I couldn't have picked a worse time to say those words, for the Brain Hotel chose that moment to start to collapse. It started in the uppermost floors, where a few of the more solitary souls resided: a loud, thunderous rumbling, like God bowling in an empty dancehall. Then it became louder and louder, as if each floor were collapsing and falling down on the next, and so on. For all I knew, it was.

"Come, Father Death, come!" Kennedy was shouting.

But it wasn't Kennedy who got it first. A large chunk of ceiling exploded right above a group of souls gathered by the doorway--including Doug and Old Tom. Then, to rub salt into the wound, the floor beneath them erupted upwards a second later. I could only assume that everything--plaster, bricks, souls--met halfway, violently. Hopefully, the stoner bastard never knew what hit him.

I bolted for the stairway. The booming from above pounded closer and closer. I quickly decided the stairs were not an ideal escape route. I spun, and the wall I was now facing shattered into a million pieces, flying debris cutting Kevin Kennedy into an equal number of individual pieces. I tucked myself into a ball on the lobby carpet, waiting for something to rip me apart, too. The only mystery was the direction.

I heard plenty of explosions, but nothing so much as a flying brick touched me.

After a minute or so, I dared to stand up and look. I was still standing on a patch of the lobby carpet, but the carpet was positioned in the middle of a vast field of green, reaching into the distance. No debris, no bodies. Then again, souls didn't have bodies, I supposed. Just astral perceptions of bodies. Every last astral perception, it seemed, had been blown to smithereens.

The Brain Hotel was gone. But what was this surrounding me? I'd never built any kind of landscape around the hotel. I was never a big fan of mowing lawns, Brain-conjured or not.

There was more, too--another hotel complex a mile away, across a green field--a superhotel, the Las Vegas variety. Behind it, the fields rolled outward into a blue infinity, occasionally interrupted by patches of gold lines and other, hotel-like structures. The more I stared, the more I could make out another piece of land, across the blue infinity. An island. Where the hell was I?

"I was wondering when you'd arrive," a voice said. I snapped my head around. It was Paul After.

"Brad told me you were dead," I said.

"I've been dead as long as you've known me."

Even
I
was getting tired of the dead cracks. "Do you know where we are?"

Paul puffed up his chest, and started to look around, as if he were a tour guide. "The best I can figure is that this is the place between death and whatever lies beyond it. I'm not even sure how long I've been here. Do you know?"

"Not too long. I think it's been about a day since Brad told me he offed you."

"Oh. Right." Paul's eyebrows furrowed. "Brad was pretty pissed. Of course, he had every reason to be."

"So you
knew
you were one and the same?"

"No, no," Paul insisted. "I never lied to you. I didn't realize who I was until I was sent to this place. It gave me a sense of clarity I've never felt before. That's when I realized I was--
am
--nothing more than an invented personality. I was John Paul Bafoures, criminal mastermind, and Brad was the normal, upright, tax-paying citizen. It was brilliant. Most killers invent a cover, some ordinary boring life, to avoid detection; Brad Larsen actually lived it. I was the aberration."

"He made you up?"

Yep," Paul said. "And I finally remembered what I did to piss him off."

"Spit in his Cheerios one morning?"

"Last July, Brad decided to turn himself into the Witness Protection Program--to protect Alison, and start over, with a clean slate, I presume. Or maybe start up business someplace else. He decided to erase me, pretend I didn't exist. Naturally, this didn't make me happy. So I sent an order to have
him
killed."

"You what? But you
were
Brad."

"No, I was part of Brad. A distinct personality within his own. I wanted revenge. Don't forget--I was a ruthless, bloodthirsty killer. Brad made me that way."

"How did you pull it off?"

"One night, when Brad was sleeping, I took over his body, and made a quick phone call to Las Vegas. Asked an associate of ours to arrange a quick assassination. I suppose he picked this Ray Loogan guy--an absolute nobody."

"Then why was the paycheck half a million?" I asked.

"It was the price I'd set. After all, J.P. Bafoures was good for it. I wanted to wipe the slate as clean as possible."

When I thought about it, I realized how right Paul was. Nine months ago, I didn't know who this "Brad Larsen" was either. I assumed it was a cover name for some higher-up in the Association who'd decided to screw his buddies over. The tip I heard was simple gossip: Bafoures was having some guy in Illinois killed. I inferred that this Larsen must be damned important if the Association was going to send a killer across a couple of states and give him a half a mil to boot. I happened to absorb a local Fed named Kevin Kennedy around the same time, and the rest is recent history.

Only there was no "Association." There was no "Brad Larsen."

There was no point.

* * * *

"So what brought
you
to this lovely place?" Paul asked.

I took a deep breath. This was going to be the best story Paul After would ever hear in this life. And quite possibly the next one. "Right after your ... uh, experience with our client, Brad and Fieldman confronted me in the hotel lobby. Said they didn't need me anyone. Told me they'd killed you, and they were taking over the operation, and zappo, the next thing I know, my soul is in a toilet. I hitch a ride on our cat, when suddenly Amy from upstairs shows up. I jump into her, only, she's not her, she's a robot, and what's more, she contains the soul of Alison Larsen."

Paul whistled. If I were him, I would have whistled, too.

"Yeah. And then I live through her grisly death, bullet to the throat and post-mortem torture by 8-year-olds, then wake up and put on a goddamned cocktail dress and hightail it over to the Art Museum before Brad starts killing everybody. A body swap here, a body swap there, Brad takes over and the next thing I know, I'm lying on a cold slab of museum marble with my brains hanging out of my skull. The hotel flips out, the whole place goes up in nuclear hellfire, and I find myself here, talking to you."

"Wait a minute," Paul said. "You mean our physical body is dying?"

"If not already dead."

"Uh-oh."

"What? What do you mean by uh-oh?"

"It's only a theory," Paul said, "but I was beginning to surmise the only thing keeping me here, in this place between Death and the Next, was that your physical body was still alive."

"And what's Next?"

"I think we're about to find out."

* * * *

As if on cue, the first mushroom cloud appeared over a tiny island in the deep, hazy distance. It looked unreal, like cheap animation.

And then another. Closer this time, less cartoon-like. A hotel out in the distance exploded upon impact. Then another--each one more like an angry geyser of steam than an H-bomb, but burning everything nonetheless.

"Maybe they'll miss us."

"I don't think so," Paul said.

Another nuclear blast, even closer. I felt the air sizzle around us. This was how I'd always imagined a nuclear attack to be, way back when I was a grade-schooler and forced to tuck myself under my desk during an air raid siren.

Naturally, I instinctually understood that all this carnage and destruction was merely my brain's representation of itself dying, shutting down. The same creative powers I'd harnessed to build the Brain Hotel were now turned against me, showing me my own personal apocalypse with the very things that had always terrified me the most. This knowledge did not help me from being scared out of my mind.

Paul said, "In case I don't see you again, it was nice working with you."

"Me, too," I said.

Finally, as I'd feared, the hotel complex directly across the way imploded and funneled up high into the sky, like white foam from a faucet shooting in the wrong direction.
That was too close
, I thought. And the air became alive with electricity and burning and everything burnt out like a photographic negative....

* * * *

That was what it was like for me to die from a bullet to the head.

Twenty-Five

Soul Gun

I woke up sometime later. The sun hadn't come up yet, but I could feel myself in bed. I had the blankets pulled up all the way over my head. I was freezing. Who cranked the air conditioning in this room? And the bed felt like a sheet of cold steel.

Which, of course, it was.

I was lying on a slab in the morgue.

All I had witnessed countless times in the past had, at last, come to pass for me: I was dead. And my discorporated soul was hanging around the flesh, as if it had nothing better to do. I tried calling out to Paul, but I heard no response. Was he in the Next Place already? I hoped so. Even cold-blooded killers needed a rest.