Dark Matter (4 page)

No.

I have to do something.

We step out of the tunnel onto a metal surface that's freezing against the soles of my feet. I grasp a rusted iron railing that encircles a platform. It's colder here, and the sense of open space is unmistakable.

As if on a timer, a yellow moon creeps up on Lake Michigan, slowly rising.

Its light streams through the upper windows of an expansive room, and it's bright enough in here for me to take in everything independently of the flashlight.

My stomach churns.

We're standing on the high point of an open staircase that drops fifty feet.

It looks like an oil painting in here, the way the antique light falls on a row of dormant generators below and the latticework of I-beams overhead.

It's as quiet as a cathedral.

“We're going down,” he says. “Watch your step.”

We descend.

Two steps up from the second-to-highest landing, I spin with the flashlight death-gripped in my right hand, aiming for his head…

…and hitting nothing, the momentum carrying me right back to where I started and then some.

I'm off balance, falling.

I hit the landing hard, and the flashlight jars out of my hand and disappears over the edge.

A second later, I hear it explode on the floor forty feet below.

My captor stares down at me behind that expressionless mask, head cocked, gun pointed at my face.

Thumbing back the hammer, he steps toward me.

I groan as his knee drives into my sternum, pinning me to the landing.

The gun touches my head.

He says, “I have to admit, I'm proud you tried. It was pathetic. I saw it coming a mile away, but at least you went down swinging.”

I recoil against a sharp sting in the side of my neck.

“Don't fight it,” he says.

“What did you give me?”

Before he can answer, something plows through my blood-brain barrier like an eighteen-wheeler. I feel impossibly heavy and weightless all at once, the world spinning and turning itself inside out.

And then, as fast as it hit me, it passes.

Another needle stabs into my leg.

As I cry out, he tosses both syringes over the edge. “Let's go.”

“What did you give me?”

“Get up!”

I use the railing to pull myself up. My knee is bleeding from the fall. My head is still bleeding. I'm cold, dirty, and wet, my teeth chattering so hard it feels like they might break.

We go down, the flimsy steelwork trembling with our weight. At the bottom, we move off the last step and walk down a row of old generators.

From the floor, this room seems even more immense.

At the midpoint, he stops and shines his flashlight on a duffel bag nestled against one of the generators.

“New clothes. Hurry up.”

“New clothes? I don't—”

“You don't have to understand. You just have to get dressed.”

Through all the fear, I register a tremor of hope. Is he going to spare me? Why else would he be making me get dressed? Do I have a shot at surviving this?

“Who are you?” I ask.

“Hurry up. You don't have much time left.”

I squat by the duffel bag.

“Clean yourself up first.”

There's a towel on top, which I use to wipe the mud off my feet, the blood off my knee and face. I pull on a pair of boxer shorts and jeans that fit perfectly. Whatever he injected me with, I think I can feel it in my fingers now—a loss of dexterity as I fumble with the buttons on a plaid shirt. My feet slide effortlessly into a pair of expensive leather slip-ons. They fit as comfortably as the jeans.

I'm not cold anymore. It's like there's a core of heat in the center of my chest, radiating out through my arms and legs.

“The jacket too.”

I lift a black leather jacket from the bottom of the bag, push my arms through the sleeves.

“Perfect,” he says. “Now, have a seat.”

I ease down against the iron base of the generator. It's a massive piece of machinery the size of a locomotive engine.

He sits across from me, the gun trained casually in my direction.

Moonlight is filling this place, refracting off the broken windows high above and sending a scatter of light that strikes—

Tangles of cable.

Gears.

Pipes.

Levers and pulleys.

Instrumentation panels covered with cracked gauges and controls.

Technology from another age.

I ask, “What happens now?”

“We wait.”

“For what?”

He waves my question away.

A weird calm settles over me. A misplaced sense of peace.

“Did you bring me here to kill me?” I ask.

“I did not.”

I feel so comfortable leaning against the old machine, like I'm sinking into it.

“But you let me believe it.”

“There was no other way.”

“No other way to what?”

“To get you here.”

“And why are we here?”

But he just shakes his head as he snakes his left hand up under the geisha mask and scratches.

I feel strange.

Like I'm simultaneously watching a movie and acting in it.

An irresistible drowsiness lowers onto my shoulders.

My head dips.

“Just let it take you,” he says.

But I don't. I fight it, thinking how unsettlingly fast his tenor has changed. He's like a different man, and the disconnect between who he is in this moment and the violence he showed just minutes ago should terrify me. I shouldn't be this calm, but my body is humming too peacefully.

I feel intensely serene and deep and distant.

He says to me, almost like a confession, “It's been a long road. I can't quite believe I'm sitting here actually looking at you. Talking to you. I know you don't understand, but there's so much I want to ask.”

“About what?”

“What it's like to be you.”

“What do you mean?”

He hesitates, then: “How do you feel about your place in the world, Jason?”

I say slowly, deliberately, “That's an interesting question considering the night you've put me through.”

“Are you happy in your life?”

In the shadow of this moment, my life is achingly beautiful.

“I have an amazing family. A fulfilling job. We're comfortable. Nobody's sick.”

My tongue feels thick. My words are beginning to sound slurred.

“But?”

I say, “My life is great. It's just not exceptional. And there was a time when it could have been.”

“You killed your ambition, didn't you?”

“It died of natural causes. Of neglect.”

“And do you know exactly how that happened? Was there a moment when—?”

“My son. I was twenty-seven years old, and Daniela and I had been together a few months. She told me she was pregnant. We were having fun, but it wasn't love. Or maybe it was. I don't know. We definitely weren't looking to start a family.”

“But you did.”

“When you're a scientist, your late twenties are so critical. If you don't publish something big by thirty, they put you out to pasture.”

Maybe it's just the drug, but it feels so good to be talking. An oasis of normal after two of the craziest hours I've ever lived. I know it isn't true, but it feels like as long as we keep conversing, nothing bad can happen. As if the words protect me.

“Did you have something big in the works?” he asks.

Now I'm having to focus on making my eyes stay open.

“Yes.”

“And what was it?”

His voice sounds distant.

“I was trying to create the quantum superposition of an object that was visible to the human eye.”

“Why did you abandon your research?”

“When Charlie was born, he had major medical issues for the first year of his life. I needed a thousand hours in a cleanroom, but I couldn't get there fast enough. Daniela needed me. My son needed me. I lost my funding. Lost my momentum. I was the young, new genius for a minute, but when I faltered, someone else took my place.”

“Do you regret your decision to stay with Daniela and make a life with her?”

“No.”

“Never?”

I think of Daniela, and the emotion breaks back through, accompanied by the actual horror of the moment. Fear returns, and with it a homesickness that cuts to the bone. I
need
her in this moment more than I've ever needed anything in my life.

“Never.”

And then I'm lying on the floor, my face against the cold concrete, and the drug is whisking me away.

He's kneeling beside me now, rolling me onto my back, and I'm looking up at all that moonlight pouring in through the high windows of this forgotten place, the darkness wrinkled with twitches of light and color as swirling, empty voids open and close beside the generators.

“Will I see her again?” I ask.

“I don't know.”

I want to ask him for the millionth time what he wants with me, but I can't find the words.

My eyes keep closing, and I try to hold them open, but it's a losing battle.

He pulls off a glove and touches my face with his bare hand.

Strangely.

Delicately.

He says, “Listen to me. You're going to be scared, but you can make it yours. You can have everything you never had. I'm sorry I had to scare you earlier, but I had to get you here. I'm so sorry, Jason. I'm doing this for both of us.”

I mouth the words,
Who are you?

Instead of responding, he reaches into his pocket and takes out a new syringe and a tiny glass ampoule filled with a clear liquid that in the moonlight shines like mercury.

He uncaps the needle and draws the contents of the vial up into the syringe.

As my eyelids slowly lower, I watch him slide the sleeve up his left arm and inject himself.

Then he drops the ampoule and the syringe on the concrete between us, and the last thing I see before my eyes lock shut is that glass ampoule rolling toward my face.

I whisper, “Now what?”

And he says, “You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

I'm aware of someone gripping my ankles.

As hands slide under my shoulders, a woman says, “How'd he get out of the box?”

A man responds: “No idea. Look, he's coming to.”

I open my eyes, but all I see is blurred movement and light.

The man barks, “Let's get him the hell out of here.”

I try to speak, but the words fall out of my mouth, garbled and formless.

The woman says, “Dr. Dessen? Can you hear me? We're going to lift you onto a gurney now.”

I look toward my feet, and the man's face racks into focus. He's staring at me through the face shield of an aluminized hazmat suit with a self-contained breathing apparatus.

Glancing at the woman behind my head, he says, “One, two, three.”

They hoist me onto a gurney and lock padded restraints around my ankles and wrists.

“Only for
your
protection, Dr. Dessen.”

I watch the ceiling scroll past, forty or fifty feet above.

Where the hell am I? A hangar?

I catch a glint of memory—a needle puncturing my neck. I was injected with something. This is some crazy hallucination.

A radio squawks, “Extraction team, report. Over.”

The woman says with excitement bleeding through her voice, “We have Dessen. We're en route. Over.”

I hear the squeak of wheels rolling.

“Copy that. Initial condition assessment? Over.”

She reaches down with a gloved hand and wakes some kind of monitoring device that's been Velcroed to my left arm.

“Pulse rate: one-fifteen. BP: one-forty over ninety-two. Temp: ninety-eight-point-nine. Oh-two sat: ninety-five percent. Gamma: point-eight seven. ETA thirty seconds. Out.”

A buzzing sound startles me.

We move through a pair of vaultlike doors that are slowly opening.

Jesus Christ.

Stay calm. This isn't real.

The wheels squeak faster, more urgently.

We're in a corridor lined with plastic, my eyes squinting against the onslaught of light from fluorescent bulbs shining overhead.

The doors behind us slam shut with an ominous clang, like the gates to a keep.

They wheel me into an operating room toward an imposing figure in a positive pressure suit, standing under an array of surgical lights.

He smiles down at me through his face shield and says, as if he knows me, “Welcome back, Jason. Congratulations. You did it.”

Back?

I can only see his eyes, but they don't remind me of anyone I've ever met.

“Are you experiencing any pain?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“Do you know how you got the cuts and bruises on your face?”

Shake.

“Do you know who you are?”

I nod.

“Do you know where you are?”

Shake.

“Do you recognize me?”

Shake.

“I'm Leighton Vance, chief executive and medical officer. We're colleagues and friends.” He holds up a pair of surgical shears. “I need to get you out of these clothes.”

He removes the monitoring device and goes to work on my jeans and boxer shorts, tossing them into a metal tray. As he cuts off my shirt, I gaze up at the lights burning down on me, trying not to panic.

But I'm naked and strapped to a gurney.

No, I remind myself, I'm
hallucinating
that I'm naked and strapped to a gurney. Because none of this is real.

Leighton lifts the tray holding my shoes and clothes and hands it to someone behind my head, outside my line of sight. “Test everything.”

Footsteps rush out of the room.

I note the sharp bite of isopropyl alcohol a second before Leighton cleans a swatch of skin on the underside of my arm.

He ties a tourniquet above my elbow.

“Just drawing some blood,” he says, taking a large-gauge hypodermic needle from the instrument tray.

He's good. I don't even feel the sting.

When he's finished, Leighton rolls the gurney toward the far side of the OR to a glass door with a touchscreen mounted on the wall beside it.

“Wish I could tell you this is the fun part,” he says. “If you're too disoriented to remember what's about to happen, that's probably for the best.”

I try to ask what's happening, but words still elude me. Leighton's fingers dance across the touchscreen. The glass door opens, and he pushes me into a chamber that's just large enough to hold the gurney.

“Ninety seconds,” he says. “You'll be fine. It never killed any of the test subjects.”

There's a pneumatic hiss, and then the glass door glides shut.

Recessed lights in the ceiling glow a chilled blue.

I crane my neck.

The walls on either side of me are covered with elaborate apertures.

A fine, supercooled mist sprays out of the ceiling, coating me head to toe.

My body tenses, the frigid droplets beading on my skin and freezing solid.

As I shiver, the walls of the chamber begin to hum.

A white vapor trickles out of the apertures with a sustained hiss that grows louder and louder.

It gushes.

Then jets.

Opposing streams crash into each other over the gurney, filling the chamber with a dense fog that blots out the overhead light. Where it touches my skin, the frozen droplets explode in bursts of agony.

The fans reverse.

Within five seconds, the gas is sucked out of the chamber, which now holds a peculiar smell, like the air on a summer afternoon moments before a thunderstorm—dry lightning and ozone.

The reaction of the gas and the supercooled liquid on my skin has created a sizzling foam that burns like an acid bath.

I'm grunting, thrashing against the restraints and wondering how much longer this could possibly be allowed to go on. My threshold for pain is high, and this is straddling the line of make-it-stop or kill me.

My thoughts fire at the speed of light.

Is there even a drug capable of this? Creating hallucinations and pain at this level of horrifying clarity?

This is too intense, too real.

What if this is actually happening?

Is this some CIA shit? Am I in a black clinic in the throes of human experimentation? Have I been kidnapped by these people?

Glorious, warm water shoots out of the ceiling with the force of a fire hose, pummeling the excruciating foam away.

When the water shuts off, heated air roars out of the apertures, blasting my skin like a hot desert wind.

The pain vanishes.

I'm wide-awake.

The door behind me opens and the gurney rolls back out.

Leighton looks down at me. “Wasn't so bad, right?” He pushes me through the OR into an adjoining patient room and unlocks the restraints around my ankles and wrists.

With a gloved hand, he pulls me up on the gurney, my head swimming, the room spinning for a moment before the world finally rights itself.

He observes me.

“Better?”

I nod.

There's a bed and a dresser with a change of clothes folded neatly on top. The walls are padded. There are no sharp edges. As I slide to the edge of the stretcher, Leighton takes hold of my arm above the elbow and helps me to stand.

My legs are rubber, worthless.

He leads me over to the bed.

“I'll leave you to get dressed and come back when your lab work is in. It won't take long. Are you all right for me to step out for a minute?”

I finally find my voice: “I don't understand what's happening. I don't know where I—”

“The disorientation will pass. I'll be closely monitoring. We'll get you through this.”

He wheels the gurney to the door but stops in the threshold, glancing back at me through his face shield. “It's really good to see you again, brother. Feels like Mission Control when
Apollo Thirteen
returned. We're all real proud of you.”

The door closes after him.

Three deadbolts fire into their housings like a trio of gunshots.

I rise from the bed and walk over to the dresser, unstable on my feet.

I'm so weak it takes me several minutes to get the clothes on—good slacks, a linen shirt, no belt.

From just above the door, a surveillance camera watches me.

I return to the bed, sit alone in this sterile, silent room, trying to conjure my last concrete memory. The mere attempt feels like drowning ten feet from shore. There are pieces of memory lying on the beach, and I can see them, I can almost touch them, but my lungs are filling up with water. I can't keep my head above the surface. The more I strain to assemble the pieces, the more energy I expend, the more I flail, the more I panic.

All I have as I sit in this white, padded room is—

Thelonious Monk.

The smell of red wine.

Standing in a kitchen chopping an onion.

A teenager drawing.

Wait.

Not
a
teenager.

My
teenager.

My son.

Not
a
kitchen.

My
kitchen.

My home.

It was family night. We were cooking together. I can see Daniela's smile. I can hear her voice and the jazz. Smell the onion, the sour sweetness of wine on Daniela's breath. See the glassiness in her eyes. What a safe and perfect place, our kitchen on family night.

But I didn't stay. For some reason, I left. Why?

I'm right there, on the brink of recollection….

The deadbolts retract, rapid-fire, and the door to the patient room opens. Leighton has traded the positive pressure suit for a classic lab coat, and he's standing in the door frame grinning, as if he's barely keeping a lid on a wellspring of anticipation. I can now see that he's roughly my age and boarding-school handsome, his face peppered conservatively with five-o'clock shadow.

“Good news,” he says. “All clear.”

“Clear of what?”

“Radiation exposure, biohazards, infectious disease. We'll have complete results from your blood scan in the morning, but you're cleared from quarantine. Oh. I have this for you.”

He hands me a Ziploc bag containing a set of keys and a money clip.

“Jason Dessen” has been scrawled in black Sharpie on a piece of masking tape affixed to the plastic.

“Shall we? They're all waiting for you.”

I pocket what are apparently my personal effects and follow Leighton through the OR.

Back in the corridor, a half-dozen workers are busy pulling the plastic down from the walls.

When they see me, they all begin to applaud.

A woman shouts, “You rock, Dessen!”

Glass doors whisk apart as we approach.

My strength and balance are returning.

He leads me into a stairwell, and we ascend, the metal steps clanging under our footfalls.

“You all right on these?” Leighton asks.

“Yeah. Where are we going?”

“Debrief.”

“But I don't even—”

“It's better if you just hold your thoughts for the interview. You know—protocol and shit.”

Two flights up, he opens a glass door that's an inch thick. We enter another corridor with floor-to-ceiling windows on one side. They look out over a hangar, which the corridors appear to encircle—four levels in all—like an atrium.

I drift toward the windows to get a better look, but Leighton guides me instead through the second door on the left, ushering me into a dimly lit room, where a woman in a black pantsuit is standing behind a table as if awaiting my arrival.

“Hi, Jason,” she says.

“Hi.”

Her eyes capture my stare for a moment as Leighton straps the monitoring device around my left arm.

“You don't mind, do you?” he asks. “I'd feel better keeping tabs on your vitals a little while longer. We'll be out of the woods soon.”

Leighton gently presses his hand into the small of my back and urges me the rest of the way inside.

I hear the door close behind me.

The woman is fortyish. Short, black hair with bangs just skirting striking eyes that somehow manage to be concurrently kind and penetrating.