Part 5 (1/2)

Both of the guards laughed. ”I think I'll have to give that one a pa.s.s,” the second soldier said. ”I'm trying to avoid court-martials here.”

”That's a good idea,” Taylor said. ”I still need you on the door.”

”Okay, Taylor, enough of your G.o.dd.a.m.n charm.” Still smiling, the first soldier gestured her over to the side of the door. ”You know the drill.”

Taylor nodded and held out her arms. The soldier lifted a portable metal detector from a loop of cord wrapped around his belt. He ran the wand over her entire body, up her front and back and then down the length of her arms and legs. After the scan, the soldier checked her pockets, giving them nothing but a quick, cursory pat. He waved her toward the building, then turned his attention to me.

The guards handled me with a bit more suspicion. I noticed the second soldier inching his gun forward as his partner looked me over; the soldier's hand came to rest on the gun's b.u.t.t, ready to slip forward into the trigger guard. And the pat down was much more thorough, the soldier's blunt hands running all the way up into my armpits and crotch. He felt the PowerBar in my pocket and made me take it out. He studied it for several seconds-holding it gingerly, as if it might explode-then tossed it over to his partner. I was about to complain, but the soldier cut me short with a curt shake of his head.

”You guys are good to go,” the soldier said, stepping up to the building and opening the door. ”You know the rules, Taylor. Nothing to make me look bad.”

”Don't worry. No anarchy today.” Taylor smiled and patted the soldier on the arm. ”I'm just catching up with Danny.” Then we pa.s.sed into the building.

The lobby was deserted. There was absolutely no furniture here, just one long, muddy carpet runner leading to a bank of elevators on the far side of the room. Lights were glowing overhead, but most of the fixtures had been cracked open and the fluorescent tubes removed. Taylor saw me looking and pointed up toward the roof. ”They've got plenty of generators up there. The bulbs, however ... they aren't faring too well.”

The elevators were working, but Taylor walked right on by, leading me to the stairwell at the far end of the alcove. The light inside was inconsistent. I glanced up toward the roof and watched the stairwell pulse above me, the light waxing and waning with the strength of the generators. I could hear the electricity pulsing. It was a slow, slow heartbeat.

We climbed up to the third floor.

Taylor opened the door and led the way down a dimly lit corridor. The entire floor seemed deserted. I glanced through a couple of doorways and found row after row of empty cubicles. There was paper scattered across the floor. Upturned lamps on each desk. A couple of abandoned staplers.

All the furniture had been moved away from the walls. It looked as if, abandoned, these office s.p.a.ces had surrendered to some previously unknown force of physics, something that pulled desks, chairs, and cubicle walls toward the center of each giant room. Maybe, in a thousand years, I'd come back and find a dense singularity in the center of each of these s.p.a.ces. Nothing but compressed office furniture collapsed in on itself.

”Here we go.” Taylor's voice echoed back down the length of the corridor, jolting me out of my reverie.

I found her in one of the big, empty rooms, squatting in front of a busted window. She was holding up Charlie's USB drive. ”Easier than smuggling it in,” she said, a sly smile on her face.

I followed her back to the stairwell, then up three more flights of stairs.

The sixth floor was bustling with activity. It had the same layout as three floors down, but the cubicles here were arranged with ruler-straight precision. And they were occupied, full of life. Each desk supported a heavy-duty notebook computer, illuminated from above by a standing desk lamp. A mix of casually dressed civilians and uniformed officers sat hunched over these machines, studying LCD screens and transcribing text from handwritten forms. A din of voices filled the air. It was standard office chatter: rat-a-tat-tat conversation, hushed laughter, m.u.f.fled curses.

The difference between this floor and the one three floors down was disorienting. The architecture was the same, but the feel was radically different. Like it was the same place-the same floor-but separated by a vast period of time.

But which comes first? I wondered. Was the third floor the past or the future? Was it an abandoned, desolate s.p.a.ce waiting for reclamation, waiting to be filled and rejuvenated? Or was it what comes next, what happens when all of these people pack up and leave, abandoning this place for good?

”This is the military command center,” Taylor explained, noticing the perplexed look on my face. ”You'll find the bigwigs up on the top two floors, plotting and planning, arranging the infrastructure, sending out search parties and data-gathering expeditions.” She gestured into one of the rooms. ”Down here, you've got the dregs, crunching numbers and cataloging information, trying to make sense of what's going on.”

We continued down the main corridor, past several more densely packed rooms. Finally, Taylor turned into a smaller office. There were only four cubicles here, all of them oversized and filled with multiple monitors. At the moment, the room held only a single occupant: a soldier dressed in a natty olive-drab uniform. He glanced up from his computer as soon as he heard us enter, and a wide smile spread across his face.

”Taylor!” the soldier exclaimed. He rose to his feet and greeted her with a warm embrace. I caught the grin on Taylor's lips and felt a moment of intense jealousy; it was an irrational reaction, I knew, but it was something I couldn't control. She was practically beaming. I hadn't known her for long, but still, from all I'd seen, I wanted to be able to elicit that type of reaction in her, the sheer magnitude of that joy.

As soon as he let go, Taylor introduced us. ”Danny, this is Dean. He's a photographer. He's trying to doc.u.ment the situation here.” The soldier's arm remained draped around Taylor's shoulder, and she reached up to pat his hand as she talked. ”Danny's my spy in the military-industrial complex. He helped me get in good with the soldiers.”

”You make it sound like treason,” Danny said. He held out his hand and I shook it. He was taller than me-about six foot two-and he had a powerful frame. His dark brown hair was sheared close to his skull, letting a glimpse of skin s.h.i.+ne through. It made the curve of his head look like a powerful, tightly flexed muscle. He had a strong handshake. ”I just help her out now and then. I figure I should do my part ... lend a hand to the little guy.”

Danny smiled. He had a perfect smile-a warm, winning smile-and that bugged me to no end. ”A photographer, huh,” he said, and he gave his head a tiny little shake. ”You should be careful out there. The captain sees the press as public enemy number one, and he's already got a couple of newsmen locked away at Fort Lewis ... Frankly, I think he just doesn't know what else to do.”

I nodded, remembering the Jeep with the P.P. plates on the outskirts of the city. Maybe I wasn't falling behind. Maybe there weren't any competing photographers in the city. Not anymore, at least. But the threat of prison-not even prison, I realized, but military detainment as some type of enemy combatant-made me feel downright nauseated. No guts, no glory, I told myself, but the feeling refused to go away.

I took a deep breath and watched as Taylor handed Danny Charlie's USB drive. He sat back down at his computer and plugged it in, double clicking an icon as soon as it appeared on the screen. After a couple of seconds, Danny removed the drive and handed it back to Taylor.

”What was that?” I asked. ”What did you just do?”

”Charlie's program,” Taylor explained. ”We load up all of our email, Danny plugs it into the military network, and it launches a burst of encrypted data out into the real world.” She smiled at the phrase. ”Charlie's got a server on the outside-decrypts all of that information and forwards it on. It also downloads all of our incoming mail, along with the latest news from a bunch of sites.” She held up the tiny drive. ”It's all in here, ready for us to start surfing at our leisure. We do it every couple of days. We'll get you hooked up next time around.”

”And the military doesn't know? Isn't that dangerous?”

”Nah,” Danny said, dismissing the concern with a wave of his hand. ”Charlie's got it streamlined down to a couple of hundred packets. As long as we aren't sending out high-definition video, it's barely noticeable. Besides, I know guys who surf hard-core p.o.r.n from their military terminals. Next to some of the nasty s.h.i.+t I've seen on their screens, this is tulips and b.u.t.terflies.”

”He also recharges for us.” Taylor pointed to a power strip beneath the soldier's desk. ”I'm sure he'd do your camera for you.”

I nodded. The thought of throwing my battery charger up through a third-story window didn't exactly fill me with joy-when I was a kid, I never played Little League, and my throwing arm was for s.h.i.+t-but it was nice to know I had the option.

”And now that we've got business out of the way ...” Taylor took a step back, leaving me hanging over Danny's shoulder, transforming the two of us into unintentional conspirators. ”Why don't you tell Dean about what you're doing here? Catch us up on all of that great government progress.”

Danny gave Taylor a scowl, then turned back to his computer. He popped open a window and started scouring through directories, looking for something. ”What do you know, Dean? About the phenomenon?”

”I've been following it on some underground message boards, and there's been some stuff that hasn't made it into the mainstream press. Some strange pictures. Some video. Vague, translucent figures, weird physics. Kids in a cell-phone video, bouncing a ball through a-” I paused, trying to think how best to describe it. ”-a sticky s.p.a.ce in the air, where the ball just slows down, then speeds up again, finally stopping and hovering in midair. Everybody knows something's going on here-there's no denying the quarantine or the government's refusal to talk-but n.o.body knows exactly what. Some type of terrorist attack, maybe. A chemical leak. A haunting.” I smiled at this last suggestion. ”Maybe something to do with an ancient Indian burial ground?”

Danny didn't smile. ”Yeah, we've got a lot of scientists trying to figure it all out. Here, on this floor, we're just gathering information. We catalog incident reports-from civilians, from our soldiers on patrol-and look for patterns.” He lifted a clipboard from the clutter on his desk. It held a photocopied sheet t.i.tled REPORT OF UNEXPLAINED INCIDENT. This particular sheet had been filled out in red ink.

Before he set it back down, I managed to read a few of the neatly typed questions: 13) What were your thoughts before, during, and after the incident? (Please be as specific as possible.) 14) What emotions did the incident evoke? (Fear? Amus.e.m.e.nt? Regret?) 15) Do you feel compelled to seek out similar experiences?

The person who had filled out this particular form had drawn a shaky red line through question 15, as if he or she were trying to strike it from existence-the question or the compulsion it described, I didn't know.

”And what have you found?” I asked.

”A lot of stuff.” Danny shrugged. ”And nothing.” He pointed to a white dry-erase board tacked to the opposite wall. There was a list of six bullet-pointed items sketched out in bold black letters. ”We've narrowed the phenomena down to six basic categories. First, you've got your visitors-people and things appearing where they shouldn't be, where they can't be. Celebrities driving through town in BMWs. Dead politicians. We've even got a cl.u.s.ter of random people who swear they saw the Empire State Building rising out of the west end of Riverfront Park, but I'm guessing that one's just complete bulls.h.i.+t. On the flip side of that, you've got our second item: disappearances. People and things that should be here but aren't. Things that just ... cease to exist. There's a whole block in the industrial district out east-it used to be warehouses, with streets and trucks and loading docks. It's all gone now. Nothing but flat, bare earth. And you know the mayor, right? You've seen the video?”

”The mayor? That was real?” I didn't bother trying to mask my surprise. ”That video made the rounds, but everyone dismissed it as a fake. I've seen page after page of a.n.a.lysis. There are splices! And they found the actress, the woman who goes on stage after the mayor disappears. She says she did it for her friend's video project.”

”Nah,” Danny said, his face lighting up with a bright smile. ”All of that stuff came from us. Misinformation. Brilliant, really! We couldn't stop the video from getting out there-it was broadcast live, after all, on national television-so we flooded the Internet with fake copies. We added splices and artifacts. We even dubbed over some of the crowd noise, to make it sound like bad acting.”

Danny opened a new window on his computer screen and launched a video clip. It was the same press conference I'd seen a dozen times before, but in amazingly clean, high-definition video-better than broadcast quality, better than anything I'd ever seen. And there was no distortion, no artifacts, no obvious splicing. It showed the mayor answering questions, getting angry, then disappearing.

In front of cameras. In front of a whole crowd of reporters.

”We put an emergency injunction on everyone in the room, requiring them to stay quiet. The woman who comes on stage-” Danny pointed to the sharply dressed woman as she stepped up to the lectern; he stayed silent as she looked around and shook her head. ”She was his press secretary. She's in New York now. We hired an actress to come forward and claim credit for her role.”

Danny shut down the video and swiveled back around. ”Truth is, the mayor's gone. He disappeared-right that day, right that millisecond-and he hasn't been seen since. And the video gives us nothing. Just-one frame he's there, with that p.i.s.sed-off look on his face, and the next frame ... poof!” He popped open his hand, showing me an empty palm.

I stood dumbstruck for a moment, trying to process this information.

”Yeah,” Danny said. ”Just blows your f.u.c.king mind.”

I glanced over at Taylor, thinking she'd break down laughing at any moment, revealing this whole thing as a big fat joke, but her face remained perfectly still.

”Anyway, after visitors and disappearances, we've got sounds without sources.” Danny pointed back to the whiteboard. ”Voices emanating from empty rooms. Displaced screams and crying. h.e.l.l, for two days an invisible gun battle raged outside the convention center; a lot of people heard that one.” Danny s.h.i.+vered, and his voice dropped. ”You could call them auditory ghosts, I guess. They usually come at night. We've got people who can't sleep for all of the things they hear.”

I remembered the soldier at the barricade. I remembered the wistful, nervous look on his face. He'd seemed like a haunted man, talking about his transfer out of the city, about how he no longer heard things.