The Apocalypse Club (21 page)

S
o I went home to bury my parents.

They weren’t actually buried, per se. Both of their wills stipulated that they wanted to be cremated and their ashes scattered in the Caribbean. There are cruise lines that specialize in this. And so my sister found herself, along with 22 other dust droppers, on the fantail of the SS Kerabatsos, 115 nautical miles south-southeast of Santo Domingo, where she was tasked with the committal of the last earthly remains of two people to the crystalline depths of a body of water they had only ever seen in photographs. I’m not sure why they asked to have their ashes dropped there. Generally speaking, my mother did not like to travel and my father never learned to swim and didn’t really care for the water.

I didn’t go. I stayed home to work out the details of the estate and make sure my brother wasn’t kicked out of his assisted living facility. My parents had always been the ones to make sure that his bills were paid on time and that he didn’t run out of important things like food and adult diapers. That responsibility was now mine. I didn’t mind. It gave me something to do other than sit around my parents’ old house trying to figure out what I was going to do with everything.

My parents had grown apart from their own siblings over the years. My aunt Lil had become a born-again Christian after her husband died, so finding a neutral topic of conversation was tricky at the best of times. My uncle Geordie had just been released from prison, where he had landed after his gambling addiction had left him in so much debt to various bookies that he had started dabbling in mortgage fraud. I told my cousin Herman to follow Geordie around like a hawk during the visitation to make sure no valuable items vanished prior to probate.

“Jesus took them up into his arms with a mighty whirlwind!” Lil told me while I sipped on a ginger ale and stared blankly at a room full of people I had not seen, in most cases, since I was a baby.

“And delivered them into a pancake house,” I added. “According to the police report, they came down right in the middle of the all-you-can-eat buffet table.”

“Geordie was eyeing the Doulton figurines in the armoire upstairs,” Herman whispered in my ear.

I looked up to see Geordie skulking around the kitchen looking in random drawers, no doubt trying to figure out where my parents might have kept the silverware. Knowing that he was coming, I had locked it in the basement closet. I nodded my thanks to Herman and wandered over to stand next to Geordie.

“How are you doing, dear boy?” he asked, awkwardly trying to envelope me in a hug.

“Fine, Joe.” Of course, I wasn’t fine, but that’s what you say. “Fair warning, though. If I see you put a single thing in your pocket other than your empty hands, I will break every single tiny fucking bone in your inner ear. Granted, I’ll have to break your skull first, you know, to get to them. But that’s a price I’m willing to pay.”

Geordie looked like he was going to say something, then puffed out his cheeks and fled through the back door. Before he was arrested, he had worked as a court stenographer and was unused to personal threats.

“Your uncle is a troubled soul,” Lil observed. “Greed has taken root in his heart.”

“And his fingers.”

“Jesus will watch over him.”

“Yeah, but Jesus might neglect to mention if the little bastard makes off with my dad’s old coin collection.”

“Your parents are in a better place. God has called them.”

I bit my tongue. I was probably the only one in the room who knew, without a doubt, that god had absolutely nothing to do with it. The whole thing was my fault. I had lured Violet away, she had told them she was going to quit, and they had blocked her escape by making it clear that there was no normal life for her to run away to. Once again, the storm I had started was destroying everything in its wake. I thought about running, but where could I go that they wouldn’t be able to find me? A cabin in the woods? Not likely. Without a debit card and an internet connection, I wouldn’t last five minutes. My only hunting and foraging skills consist of the five minutes it can sometimes take to search for a place that serves decent chicken cashew. I can get lost looking for a taxi stand at a major metropolitan airport. I certainly didn’t much fancy my chances of survival in a tent just south of the Arctic Circle, which would almost certainly be outside the delivery range of most of my favourite Chinese restaurants.

I wondered about my sister and brother. Were they potential targets too? I confess I did not fret quite as much about extended family like my uncle Geordie or aunt Lil – in his case because he kind of deserved it and in hers because, if she were suddenly sucked up into the sky, her last thought would probably be that it confirmed many of her most deeply held beliefs.

I probably got a little paranoid during that time. I started scanning all of my correspondence and random advertising wondering if there were secret coded messages buried in them. The electronic marquee in front of the rib and chicken place just happened to flash “See you tonight!” when I drove by. Was it just coincidence or was Violet on her way? I stayed up all night in my old bedroom, but she never showed. I even went in to a bra fitting at a lingerie store when the sign out front promised: “Violet is your colour! Fitting Thurs at 4!” I had to make up quite a long and elaborate story about meeting my girlfriend there and having gotten our times mixed up that I don’t think they believed for a second, but I wasn’t acting strangely enough for them to call the cops and in any case I left after less than five minutes.

Fortunately, the people closest to me and therefore best equipped to assess my apparent mental decline simply chalked it up to the trauma of my having lost my parents under such sudden and violent circumstances. Was I an orphan or was that a term that could only be applied to those who weren’t yet old enough to vote or drink?

Sleeping became a problem. I would drift off and snap awake at the smallest sound, convinced that it was the start of the next twisting black finger of death coming to suck me away into oblivion. When I did sleep, I had terrible nightmares where I was being chased across a cornfield by something I couldn’t see while trying to fill in an income tax return. It got so bad that after a while my doctor prescribed a vial full of little blue pills that left me feeling like I was regaining consciousness after brain surgery every morning. I wasn’t really sleeping, but at least I wasn’t up all night, either.

My sister took over our parents’ house. She wanted to take out a mortgage to buy out my share, but I told her I didn’t want any of it and that she could put the money toward my brother’s care instead. I managed to arrange things with the university that I could use distance ed to fulfill my remaining course obligations so that I would still get my degree. I got an apartment on the less-scuzzy side of downtown, which I told myself was only a temporary measure even though I secretly knew it probably wasn’t.

The big question, of course, was what to do next.

Max was gone, Violet was gone, and now my parents were gone, too. I hadn’t heard anything from Max in years. Assuming she was still alive, I didn’t expect to hear anything from Violet ever again, although I kept looking for little signs.

One sign I could not avoid was the one from the bank advising me that it was time to start making payments on my student loans. I applied for dozens of jobs and got call-backs on none of them. It appeared that my history degree, particularly when coupled with my years of experience in a video store and library, made me about as desirable as Hantavirus to prospective employers. There was only one video store left in town and it had a grand total of one employee who also happened to be the owner, so the odds weren’t good there. All of the library employees were unionized and my degree was not in library sciences, so my experience wasn’t helping me there, either.

In desperation, I went to a temp agency that sent me out on random and unpleasant office jobs. I spent three weeks processing student loan applications from midnight to six. Another two weeks reconfiguring an office supply store. I didn’t mind the night shifts. For some reason, it’s a lot more socially acceptable to use tranquillizers to sleep during daylight hours. You can tell yourself it’s because of the neighbours making so much damn noise or because the blinds don’t block out enough sunlight to avoid disrupting your circadian rhythms, but the truth is always waiting for you when you wake up. Was this what being an adult was like? If it was, they could keep it.

One of the jobs I worked was as an assistant policy file clerk for an insurance company called Firmamental. They appeared to be in the process of getting rid of all of their full-time staff and replacing them with temporary contract workers. I spent six months filing T135C claim sheets, and then another six months moving all of those T135C claim sheets from the first file cabinet into another (newer) file cabinet, and then the next 12 months manually entering all the information from those T135C claim sheets into a software program that was missing most of the important fields.

At the end of my second year, I was invited into the office of my supervisor, the former Orenthal Tibbs, and advised that, due to the death of one of my coworkers in a rendering plant (he was inspecting it and found out the hard way that their safety harnesses were supposed to have been recalled five years before), I was now going to be offered the job of Junior Policy Fulfilment Analyst-In-Training. And to say that from now on, he would need everyone to refer to him by his new name, Gotoguy @ Firmamental.

I immediately agreed to both. It wasn’t that much more money and, considering the rate at which Firmamental was shedding itself of pesky employees, it wasn’t any more secure than the contract work, but it was the only thing on offer. Plus, I figured Orenthal would be so upwardly mobile that I probably wouldn’t have to put up with him for long.

And so I became a small and marginally efficient piece of machinery. I even managed to stop needing the pills to sleep, since I was able to do much of it at work. Orenthal did not get promoted. I became exceedingly familiar with the phone manner of Herbert J. Sternhauser (mark III) and the breeding habits of his genetically trademarked pigs.

I did get one interesting assignment when the audit department called me in to try to make sense of some strange-looking transactions on one of the policy systems. I found out that the vice president of Solution Delivery (whatever the hell that is) had faked an accident after his eight-year-old took his Bentley for a joyride and crashed into a lamppost. He claimed that he’d been driving to church when three unidentified Asian men in a minivan waved him on to make a turn and then drove straight into him. These unidentified Asian men supposedly panicked and took off when he said he was going to call the cops, which he mysteriously failed to do (he later claimed his cell phone wasn’t working). I did some digging and found out his whole story was essentially bullshit and had been aided and abetted by his agent, who had been kind enough to forward his request to claims without asking too many questions.

Nothing happened, of course. It doesn’t look good for an insurance company to prosecute one of its own executives for insurance fraud. He was later promoted to Executive Vice President of Platform Initiatives (whatever the hell that is) and I was never asked to assist with any other investigations.

Until, that is, they asked me to track down Max.

I
hadn’t seen or heard from Max in almost eight years, but at least I had a starting point – we worked for the same company.

According to his personnel file, Max had started working for Firmamental three years ago. He had sustained some sort of combat injury overseas. The details of that were apparently classified, but whatever it was, it was serious enough that he was discharged from the GDI. He still had an active driver’s licence, so he wasn’t blinded or missing his hands or anything like that. I wondered what it could be. Was he some sort of amputee? They let you drive if you had only one foot, didn’t they? Had he sustained some sort of brain injury? Horrible burns or scarring? I wondered if I would even recognize him if I saw him again.

Why hadn’t he told me? Was he ashamed or depressed or suffering from some form of amnesia or PTSD? There was no way to know, so there was no point in getting all worked up with outlandish speculation. That didn’t stop me from doing it, but I still knew it was pointless.

He had been sent to a hospital for two months and then a rehabilitation/outpatient centre where he had stayed for another six. After he left there, he got a job with one of GDI’s subcontractors as a security consultant. A year after that, he started work at Firmamental in the Security Division, where the responsibilities included everything from making sure executives didn’t get snatched in hostile or unstable lands and returned to head office in a dozen separate mail-order envelopes to deposing foreign leaders whose policies might be considered less than favourable to Firmamental’s Five-Year Business Plan (aka the Great Underwriting Leap Forward). The Security Division worked out of a separate building with an address that was not publicly available and (apparently) did not show up on any satellite imagery, either, so it wasn’t like the two of us might have ever bumped into each other one day in the cafeteria.

Still, I couldn’t believe it. All this time we’d been working for the same company? Working in Security, Max would have had access to every piece of data in the company and probably most of the data in other companies, too. It was conceivable that he would never have had cause to look me up, but was it likely? Maybe, considering his chosen line of work, it was a good thing that he’d never had a reason to come looking for me.

Now I was supposed to go looking for him.

The reason didn’t make a whole lot of sense. He had stolen something? What on earth could Max have stolen that they would send me to try to get it back? I decided that it was probably just a pretext. They wanted to find him and didn’t want to tell me the real reason why. That was fine. I figured my chances of actually finding the guy were about zero. This would just be a good excuse to get away from Mr. Sternhauser for a few days. Who knew? Maybe I could even extend it to a week. I was pretty sure that GDI implanted microchips in all their employees so they knew exactly where they were and what they were doing at all times. Maybe Max had managed to remove his somehow. It didn’t matter. He was a professional Ghost and I was not a professional anything. He could drop out of a helicopter, cap a terrorist or two and be gone before the dust settled. I couldn’t make my way across my own apartment in the dark without tripping over the furniture.