The Living End (17 page)

“Three-oh-five,” he grunted, then went back to sitting on a folding chair and reading a rumpled copy of
Car and Driver
.

I could have found my way there by following the music and the sound of raucous laughter. It wasn’t even noon, but Jennifer had a party in full swing. A roomful of people I’d never seen before were shaking it on dirty, splintered floorboards and draped out on threadbare sofas, half of them with their lips either wrapped around a freshly rolled joint or pressed against another partygoer. Jennifer spotted me through the haze of smoke and waved, walking over.

“My new place!” she shouted over the music. “You like it?”

“Pretty sure I don’t!” I shouted back with a smile. “Somewhere we can talk?”

She tugged my sleeve and led me into the kitchen, where we could both hear ourselves think.

“Why,” I said, “are you throwing a party at ten in the morning?”

She laughed and waved a hand, giggly. I was feeling a little fuzzy myself just passing through.

“Aw, sugar, that’s whatcha call the ‘new normal.’ Starts whenever people wake up, ends when the last one drops. After a while, you don’t even notice it. I was gettin’ too hands-off living out in the burbs.”

“Considering we’re under federal investigation,” I said, “isn’t hands-off a
good
thing?”

“Not when I can take the bull by the horns. This building? I own it. I’ve been working with the Cinco Calles for years, but now they’re full partners. Gives ’em something to fight for.”

“The guards, the lookouts, changing rooms from day to day,” I said, figuring it out. “You turned this place into a fortress.”

“You always were a quick one, sugar. You know how paranoid Nicky’s being? Well, if he decides to take me out of the picture, he’s gonna have the fight of his life. Not just with the Cincos, neither. Look out there. You see the big guy in the blue and black? He’s with the Bishops. They’re not scrappin’ with the Cincos anymore, not since I sat ’em all down at a table together.”

Something about that nagged at the back of my brain, and I scoured my memory until a bulb lit up.

“The Bishops? Don’t they guard some of Nicky’s warehouses?”

“Sure do,” Jennifer said with a sly smile. “For now, anyway.”

“N
o,” I said. “Absolutely not. Not under any circumstances. Jennifer, you are
not
going to war with Nicky Agnelli.”

She had the grace to pretend to be hurt, but not enough to keep from smiling.

“What? Little ol’ me? Thought never even crossed my mind. All I’m saying is if he wants to come at me, I won’t make it easy for him. And when he tries, he might find out he doesn’t have as many friends as he thinks he does.”

I knew that tone of voice, and I knew I wasn’t going to budge her. The best I could do was shake my head and say, “Just…be careful, okay? Don’t push for a fight if you don’t have to.”

“Oh, I never push. I’m all about freedom of choice. So what brings you around?”

I took a deep breath.

“I need to get high,” I told her. “I mean,
really
high.”

She blinked. “This early in the morning? Like you don’t have work to do? I can’t be the responsible one in this friendship, Danny. I just won’t do it.”

“No, it’s not like that. Listen, you remember when I told you about the smoke-faced men? Well, I was checking out a lead, trying to track down Lauren. I got dosed with some nasty shit that put me out of my head for a while, and
they
showed up. I’m getting the idea that you can only see them if you don’t have both feet firmly on the floor of reality. I need something that’ll really mess me up, but only for a little while.”

She thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Come with me. I’ve got just the thing.”

We left the party behind, walking down to a seemingly random door on the second floor. “This one’s the real McCoy,” she said, jiggling her key in the lock. The room beyond was a cramped but clean apartment, furnished with Amish wood and gingham print, most of it furniture from her old place. A window unit rattled on full blast, filling the room with cool air, and the ceiling subdued the music from upstairs into a faint, almost hypnotic thumping.

She took me into her bedroom and clicked on a table lamp. “Take your shoes off and lay down,” she said as she rummaged through a lacquered wooden jewelry box on her dresser. She held up a small baggie filled with tiny dried lumps and weighed it in her hand, glancing back at me and frowning.

“About two grams, I’m thinking.”

“What are those?” I said. “Mushrooms?”

“Good ol’ psilocybin, nature’s gift to the shaman. Here, take these and don’t just gulp them down. Chew ’em. They don’t taste great, but they’ll work faster that way.”

I took the dried pieces dubiously and popped them into my mouth. They had an earthy, pungent flavor, like a mouthful of sour dirt. I started to have second thoughts about this plan the moment I swallowed. Just in time for the train to leave the station.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be your sitter. Gonna be right here the whole time.”

I lay there for what felt like twenty minutes, just staring at the flowered wallpaper, before I shook my head.

“Are you sure you got the real stuff? I don’t feel different at all.”

That was when the room started to vibrate.

It was subtle at first. A tremor under the bed like a low-wattage earthquake, spurring images of great gears churning a hundred miles below Jennifer’s bed. The room turned slowly, and the corners where the walls met the ceiling left neon trails in their wake.

Jennifer wouldn’t stay still. She was sitting on the edge of the bed. Then she was by the door. Then she was over by the dresser—and suddenly I realized that I was only looking at life-sized photographs that someone had cut out of a fashion magazine.

“That’s right,” I mumbled. “Jennifer is modeling in Spain and sent her pictures back to watch me. It all makes sense now.”

“The rain in Spain falls mainly in your brain,” buzzed the smoke-faced man in the mortarboard and smock, perching on Jennifer’s dresser.

“We’ve replaced this sorcerer’s illusion with conditions of stark and terrible reality!” said his suited companion, now standing at my bedside. “Let’s see if he notices.”

“This isn’t reality,” I said.

Then we were in Nepal.

“We were not in the tomb,” the professor said softly, almost fearfully, as we walked through the steaming jungle under the light of a hot-pink sun. “We did not give her the ring.”

“You told me that back at the shelter,” I said. “So who did?”

“
The Garden
,” the professor whispered.

The pink sun tumbled from the sky like a shooting star, turning day to night in the space of a trembling breath. What rose in its place was a moon made of rotting meat, its vast surface pitted with crawling black mold, glowing in a starless sky.

Young Lauren Carmichael crept from the underbrush with a hooded lantern in her hand, moving swift and sure-footed. Night birds warbled in the dark. We floated behind Lauren as she approached the overgrown and vine-tangled entrance to the unearthed tomb.

“This is the part Eugene Planck didn’t see,” I said. “His memories showed them discovering the door, and how she had Solomon’s ring the next day, but he wasn’t here for this.”

I expected to see Lauren take a machete to the tangled roots. Instead, they moved aside on their own. Vines untwisted and brambles pulled away, parting like the Red Sea for her slow and curious descent. We followed her down, drawn by the firefly glow of her lantern.

Green lichens clung to the ancient stone walls, and soon grass began to spring between the cracks in the floor. Somehow, deep beneath the soil and away from the sun’s light, life thrived in the musty tunnel air. A strange flower rose up from a bed of grass, and I crouched to take a closer look.

It was made of skin.

The flower bent and wilted, its bloody petals glistening, and a nodule of flesh at its tip began to throb and stretch from within. It burst with a wet
splurt
, spitting yellow pus across the grass. I watched in horror as the blades of grass started to thicken, twist, and sprout tiny pustules of their own.

“Do you know another word for life abundant?” the professor’s voice buzzed in my ear. “We did not build this place. We did not give her the ring.”

“We can go no further!” the suited man cried. “You must be this tall to ride! You must have a body, and we refuse! We are against having bodies!”

“Against having bodies,” I repeated as the world turned fluid and ran like wet paint at the edges. “Against bodies. You’re anti…”

I blinked.

“You’re antibodies.”

We stood in a laboratory, invisible and bodiless amid huge stainless-steel vats and racks of elaborate industrial tools. Nedry and Clark were there, though they both looked younger, like they’d come fresh out of college, and they were in a shouting match with a man I’d never seen before. He looked too laid-back for the room, with his gray hair tied back in a ponytail and his open lab coat draped over ragged jeans and a tie-dye T-shirt. Their words were muffled, impossible to make sense of, as if they were talking underwater.

I felt us slide in time, like squeezing through a tunnel of vinyl coated in warm grease. Green droplets dribbled from a palmed plastic tube, blending into a cup of coffee. We slid through time again, five minutes into the future-past, and the coffee came with us. I shouted for the ponytailed man not to drink it, but my words spilled out in the shape of soap bubbles and popped helplessly on the floor.

“Hey, buddy,” Clark said pleasantly, rubbing the man’s shoulders. “You okay? You look sick.”

The man frowned, three shades of color draining from his face in the space of a breath.

“I…do feel a little nauseous, yes. Must have been something I ate.”

“You should go home,” Clark said. “Nedry and I can handle the next round of trials. Go on. It’s okay.”

A train blasted through the laboratory wall, trailing streamers of light. In its wake we stood in a desolate subway station lined with dingy olive tiles. The crumpled front page of the
New York Post
blew past my shoes on a gust of cold wind. The ponytailed man checked his watch and walked into the men’s room. We followed.

He was alone, splashing water on his face from the grime-smeared sink under the buzzing glow of a flickering light sconce. He looked at himself in the long row of mirrors, touching his pallid cheeks with shaky fingers.

Nedry casually strolled into the bathroom, stood at the sink next to him, and started washing his hands.

“Hey, Bob,” he said.

“Nedry? What are you—”

The ponytailed man—Bob—froze. He looked from the reflection in the mirror to the actual sink on his right. Nobody was there.

Nedry’s reflection turned off his faucet and shook droplets of water from his hands. The droplets spattered against the inside of the mirror, like rain on a windshield.

“Bad news, Bob. Word from the top. We have to downsize the team. Looks like you’re the first casualty.”

Bob’s hands flew up, fingers hooked in a ritual gesture I knew well: the first step of a warding spell. He didn’t have time to finish.

The mirror exploded.

Shards of broken glass sliced across his face and chest. One jagged chunk impaled his arm down to the bone, and he tumbled to the filthy floor. The door to the restroom swung open, and a man in a hoodie and dark glasses speed-walked in. As he got close, I recognized Clark’s face. Clark dipped down, picked up a shard of glass from the ground—one with a long, sharp tip—and bent over Bob.

He drove the shard into Bob’s chest, again and again, as Nedry watched with glee from a ragged chunk of mirror at the edge of the buckled frame. Nedry’s head dipped out of sight, then reappeared again a second later.

“Security guard just walked past the mirror over the ticket gate,” he said. “You’ve got twenty seconds of clear space between here and the loading platform. Go!”

Clark dropped the shard and dug in his pockets, pulling on heavy winter gloves instead of taking time to wash the blood from his hands. He strode back out as briskly as he’d come in, as if nothing had happened.

The smoke-faced men hovered on either side of the fallen victim, their dangling feet an inch above the spreading pool of blood and shattered glass.

“Find our father,” they buzzed in unison.

“W
hat, him?” I said, nodding down at the body. “You want me to find a dead man?”

“He is not dead,” the professor said. “Find his grave, and you will see.”

I lay in Jennifer’s bed. She handed me a slice of orange.

The orange burst between my teeth, and the juice rolled down my tongue like a first drink of water after a week in the desert. Jennifer’s hand left little trails of light in its wake, but they sparked and faded fast.

“You steady there, sugar?” she asked. “Think you’re coming out of it now. Eat up. Vitamin C makes for a smoother landing.”

I didn’t have to be told. The last traces of the psilocybin pumping through my veins turned the slice of orange into a symphony.

“You get what you needed?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I croaked, learning to use my voice again. “No. Sort of. I’m not sure. What time is it?”

She glanced at her wrist. “Little after three. You’ve been out for a few hours.”

I groaned. Longer than I’d wanted to spend in a drug-induced haze, but at least I had something resembling a lead. Assuming, of course, that the smoke-faced men weren’t walking me into a trap just like they’d manipulated Lauren. But I had to check it out. Didn’t have a whole lot in the way of alternatives.

I pushed myself up, willing my stubborn muscles back to life. “Need to get in touch with Pixie.”

Jennifer gave her hair a little flip. “Yeah? Say hey for me, all right?”

“Jennifer,” I said, catching her tone, “we already talked about this. Pix is straight edge. She’s not going to work for a drug dealer.”

“Work, nothin’. That girl is
fine
. You ever find out what team she’s playing for, you let me know.”