Concrete Underground (2010) (23 page)

His voice was soft and smooth, barely whispering, but still deep. I stood there, transfixed, and watched him perform.

About half way through the song, I finally recognized that it was Max.

---

Max and I walked together through the party. He was still in drag and trying to explain his theory about the last episode of
Twin Peaks
. It involved something to do with time having a physical shape like a Mobius strip, only the shape existed in a different dimension that we can't see, the way that a sphere exists in a dimension that a circle doesn't.

"Or it's like, what a Mobius strip is to a figure eight drawn on a piece of paper, that's what time's shape is to a Mobius strip. Four-dimensional."

"What the fuck are you babbling about?" I demanded as I drained another glass of wine.

"I'm telling you how the last episode could take place twenty-five years before the dream Cooper had at the beginning of the first season."

We walked past Violet and Anthony. They were pressed against a wall in an embrace, feeding each other hors d'oeuvres. A dollop of caviar dripped off a cracker onto Violet's cleavage, and Anthony leaned in to lick it off.

"Wait, what?" I said, looking away from them and back to Max.

"Look, did you ever see the long version of the pilot?"

---

I sat next to Max on a red velvet couch. The room was dimly lit by a trio of candle fixtures on the wall. A beautiful woman in a black corset and stockings walked toward us slowly, seductively. She had long, jet black hair and light mocha skin. Her face was obscured by a gunmetal mask like the servers downstairs, except hers was a half-mask, exposing her full, ruby red lips.

Max turned to look at me with knowing grin.

"Wait, this didn't happen yet," I said.

---

"What didn't happen yet?" the strawberry-blonde next to me asked.

"I don't know, I'm starting to get a little rough around the edges," I replied.

She shook her head. "You shouldn't have drank so much before coming down here. Maybe you should just hang back; it can get pretty dangerous."

We were sitting around in a sub-basement under the Highwater Building, which was full of crates and metal storage containers. There were a little more than a dozen of us, but we had all broken into smaller groups to socialize while we waited for the game to start.

My clique consisted of the strawberry-blonde, who was about my age, and another man in his late-thirties. She was the head of governmental affairs at Abrasax, and he ran R&D for Inspiratech. Both were card-carrying member of the Highwater Society.

They both looked like athletic types and were dressed like they were going hiking or rock climbing or something. The woman was wearing a tank top and cargo pants, while the man had on a flak jacket over a t-shirt and camouflage pants. Both were carrying backpacks loaded up with serious outdoors gear - flashlights, ropes, carabiners, pulleys.

"He can't back out now," the man replied, shaking his head. "Especially not his first time."

The woman had engaged me in conversation because she thought I was someone she knew from high school. Even though we quickly figured out that she was mistaken, she still invited me to stay and talk with them.

I decided to accept the offer, honestly, because she was the best looking of the women in my immediate field of vision. She wasn't exactly my type, but attractive nonetheless - a peppy, girl-next-door type with big green eyes, a china doll face, and a pair of tits just a touch too large for her slight frame.

My appreciation of that last feature was not lost on her companion, who would periodically catch me looking and respond by moving in closer to her, as if marking his territory. When he did this, she would wait just long enough not to be rude, and then take a couple steps herself, reestablishing the distance between them. I took it less as a signal to me of her availability, and more as a signal too him of their boundaries.

"Are you nervous?" the man asked me.

I shook my head. "Should I be?"

He smiled and shrugged. "I guess we'll see."

"Do you remember your first time, how nervous you were?" the woman teased. "I thought you were going to shit yourself."

The man chuckled and explained to me, "A colleague from work - really he was more like my mentor - convinced me to start playing as a networking opportunity. The next thing I know it's two in the morning and Max is teaching me how to break into a bank."

"It's really not that hard once you get the hang of it," the woman chimed in.

"Why does Dylan Maxwell need to know how to break into a bank?" I asked. "He can't need the money."

"It was part of the game," the man replied, drawing out and over-annunciating every word to indicate the answer should have been obvious to me. "The object was to see who could find the most interesting thing in a safety deposit box. The guy who won found an actual human heart; it had been treated or whatever to preserve it, but Max had it checked out and verified it was legit."

A few minutes later, a hatch door in the ground opened up, and Max emerged from the opening. "We're good to go," he announced. "Come on down."

One by one, we descended into the hatch down a ladder, which brought us into a decaying room that looked like it might have once been a bank vault. Max led us out of the vault into another room, which indeed could have once been the lobby of a bank, but looked as if it had been built in the 19
^th
century and left to rot ever since.

Which, as Max explained, actually was the case.

"This town was first founded in the shadow of the east foothills," he said. "It was just a stopover on the trail to the gold mines up north, a place for men looking to make their fortunes to stock up and refresh themselves. The mining supply stores, banks, and gold brokers did pretty good business; the bars and whore houses did better."

We walked through the bank lobby and out what was once the front door, which opened into a large tunnel about a story high buttressed by concrete. The length of the tunnel was lined on either side by the remnants of the facades of old buildings. Directly across from the bank was the storefront with a painted wooden sign for
McPherson's General Store
.

"This used to be Main Street," Max continued. "You see, the 1906 quake caused a land slide that buried the old town. However, by that time the city's most powerful businessmen had realized the true value of this valley - that practically anything would grow in its soil - so they simply rebuilt the city on top of the ruins.

"Back in the fifties, during the cold war, the city started looking into building underground fallout shelters in case of nuclear attack. They discovered the remnants of the old town and decided to preserve them as a historical site. It now exists as a labyrinthine series of subterranean tunnels connecting the old buildings. The idea was to make them safe for tourists to walk through, but the funding dried up and the project was never completed. These tunnels snake around, under, above, and through the old buildings in an intricate maze with a total length of over thirty miles if laid end-to end. The buildings themselves have multiple rooms, some have multiple stories, some basements, and all are in a dangerous state of ill-repair. So watch yourselves out there," he added with a mischievous grin.

He then reached into his pocket and produced another small red metal box. "Somewhere in the ruins of old town there is hidden a box that looks exactly like this. This one is empty, but the other contains something very valuable. Find it, and it's yours to keep."

---

I was back upstairs in the Highwater Building, wandering through a maze of unfamiliar hallways. I was looking for the bathroom again, but I must have made a wrong turn somewhere because I was completely lost.

I turned a corner and saw one of the masked servers.

"Hey, do you know which way leads back to the main ballroom?" I asked.

"Sure," he said, approaching me. "But first, you have to tell me where you hid the Ariadne Key."

The voice was unmistakable; this was the same man who had interrogated me with the taser. I turned to run, but he was on top of me before I had even made it a yard.

"Not quite ready to talk yet?" he said as I felt a cold blade press into the flesh of my neck. "Look ahead."

Inexplicably, I lifted my eyes and obeyed him. Directly in front of us, painted on the wall, was the crowned globe symbol of the Highwater Society. It shifted and shimmered, as if it had been painted in mercury, having a hypnotic effect on me.

I felt myself slipping into a trance, which was broken only when I felt jostled from behind. I turned to see Violet and my assailant struggling on the floor, each trying to wrest the dagger away from each other. I reached into my pocket and dug out my pocketknife, then jammed it into the base of his neck.

He let out an anguished cry and sent the back of his fist flying into my nose, stunning me. He knocked over Violet and tore off around a corner into a connecting hallway. We tried to give chase, but by the time we recovered and made it around the corner, he was gone without a trace.

"Come on, let's get you outside for some fresh air," Violet told me.

I followed her back the other way.

"It was lucky you happened to be going by," I said, still shook-up.

"It wasn't all luck," she said. "Turns out you were right."

I looked at her questioningly.

"I'm starting to pop out," she explained, grinning while adjusting her dress around her cleavage. "I was headed for the bathroom to fix myself up."

"Was the bathroom that way?" I asked.

"Yeah, you were right outside it when I found you," she said.

"I've been so confused tonight," I replied.

---

"Don't worry," Columbine said, her face scant inches from mine. "Someone was slipping something into your drinks. They were trying to disorient you so they could get information. It's just messing with your head a little, but you should be fine by tomorrow morning."

She rolled over away from me and returned to the arms of the young man lying next to her, whom she had been cuddling.

I stood up found myself in a large open room illuminated only by black lights and star light coming in from the massive glass sun roofs overhead. The walls were all mirrors.

The floor was covered with blankets, pillows, and cushions, on top of which couples and sometimes groups of more were laying down and embracing each other. They were all fully clothed, and there wasn't any overt sexual activity. There wasn't even really any kissing. It was just people holding each other.

I treaded carefully over the bodies until I found the strawberry-blonde from underground with her arms wrapped around a dark-haired woman I didn't recognize. She was behind the other woman, cradling her body against her own.

I laid down behind her in the same position, pressing my pelvis snugly up against her ass. "Congratulations," I said.

She looked over her shoulder and flashed me a smile. "Thank you."

"So what did you get for winning?"

She shook her head playfully, "You know I can't tell you that."

"I guess I'll just have to win another game myself to find out," I replied.

"Some day. But don't expect it to happen right away. These people take their competitions seriously, and this was your first time, after all."

I nodded, and then after a pause added, "You know, you never told me what
your
first game was like."

She turned her head back to face forward, looking away from me. "Well, let's see," she began. "I joined when I was sixteen. My father was already a member, and he thought it would be good for me. On the first night I went out with Max, there were only a handful of us, like six or seven, all women. Max helped us get into these horrible disguises, like big wigs and trashy make-up, leopard print and bustiers and leather skirts. Then he drove us down to the north end of San Hermes Park late at night with nothing but the clothes on our backs and turned us loose with all the drug dealers, the vagrants, the junkies, the hookers. And he told us the one who had made the most money by daybreak was the winner.

"I was the one who lost that night. I didn't make a single cent. I wanted to play the game, I thought I could, and I even found a man. I got into his car, and he drove down the street and pulled into the empty parking lot of a middle school. He parked the car and didn't say anything, just unfastened his seat belt, reclined his seat, and unzipped himself. Then he looked at me with the most disgusting face I've ever seen - I still can see it to this day - and I realized that this wasn't about sex to him, it wasn't about getting off. He hated himself for being ugly, for being old, for being fat, for being too much of an asshole for any woman to voluntarily put up with. And he hated me for being young and beautiful, he hated me for making him desire me. And this was his way of getting revenge, by subordinating me to him, by taking me down to his level. Somehow, looking at him in the car with his disgusting little prick peeking up out of his open pants, I knew all this to be true, and it made me sick. I opened the car door and ran out as fast as I could, I ran for something like a dozen blocks before I finally collapsed, and I just felt sick. I tried to throw up to see if it would help, but I could only dry heave. So then I just went back to the park and waited for daybreak to come and told Max what happened. And so I lost.

"A week later my father lost his job. Max leaked to the paper that he had been keeping a mistress who was drawing a salary of $500,000 a year from his company as a 'consultant' even though she never set foot in the building and hardly spoke a word of English. He had also been using his expense account to fly them overseas for vacations under the guise of market research. Two days after this all came out, he killed himself. My mom and I lost everything and ended up on the streets. Instead of going away to an ivy league university, I had to stay with her and work two jobs to put myself through community college. It was rough, but I ended up finishing my degree at State and getting a scholarship to Stanford to get my Master's. The day I graduated, Max came to see me and told to me that he never harms the people who lose his games. He just tests them, shows them who they really are. I told him that I already knew this. And then he offered me a job."