Three A.M. (8 page)

I had called Central shortly after Rebecca left my office and asked for Samuel Ayers. The woman on the other end mumbled and clicked at her console and eventually said that rarely heard word: “Transferring.” I had interrupted, asking to which department, and she replied, “Science and Development Research. Transferring.”

Once I got the phone-answering drone in the Science and Development Department, my trail had, not surprisingly, gone cold. When I had asked for Ayers, the man on the other end of the line clicked at his console, then asked me to repeat the name. He typed more, the line was silent for a minute, and then he came back on, saying, “We have no information to distribute on a Samuel Ayers. Good day.”

I’d learned long ago not to start making assumptions when the facts aren’t in, as often one will start to treat the two as equals, but still it brought up intriguing questions. Was he a scientist? They didn’t tend to have many enemies.

I stood looking out at the gray curtain sliding past my window, doing what I did best—drinking and letting my mind wander. I decided on going to the Science and Development Research Department the next day and trying to talk my way into more information on Ayers. I’d go to the police station and hit up the few guys who didn’t shut doors on me for details on Fallon. But for now, I was done working. Done focusing. With a real case like this—not some shakedown bullshit work—I put the pieces together mostly when I wasn’t trying to. I’d often wake up with a new idea or click two pieces together while finishing a scotch at Albergue.

I drew a deep, tepid bath and lowered myself into my rust-stained tub. The cool water felt excellent—refreshing and relaxing. It was funny how often on nights when the fog was bad I’d get home damp and sweating, and immediately get into the shower or bath. Water washing away water. I think part of the reason I like bathing so much is that it forces you to do nothing. Or at most very little. Cigarettes and tubs go very well together, especially with a glass of whiskey on the side. But you can’t really work; if you think of something you want to do, it’s a process—get up, dry off, dress—so anything that can be put off is.

Head back, I closed my eyes and dipped the smoke I was holding into the water, and then tossed the butt away. My mind was blissfully blank. I sat perfectly still in the cool water for a long time.

*   *   *

With a ragged gasp, I awoke and sat bolt upright in bed. My eyes went immediately to the Sun Sphere—3:00
A.M.
on the dot. I caught my breath and dropped back down onto the sweat-soaked mattress, throwing the rumpled sheets and blanket off my body. Had I just been dreaming? I felt thoughts slipping away from me … images in the offing and memory on the horizon. A bright green field. People walking toward me from very far away … Heller’s face.

I let out a long, slow breath, giving up. Whatever had been in my head, I’d lost it. Which was just as well—usually my dreams were less than pleasant. I was pretty sure I knew what dream it had been anyway, and I tried not to think about it. But sleep would not take me back, so in the familiar haze of Salk’s drugs, still working their way throughout my bloodstream, I let the thoughts in.

The worst thing I’ve ever had to do was shoot the sick. I’d cursed myself a million times for not joining the army at nineteen like I had originally planned; had I not put it off those few short years, I would have been done and out by the time the virus came. They stationed us out on the roads and made it very simple: People heading out of the city were to be turned back—people approaching the city were to be shot.

No one knew what it was, but it spread fast, and the afflicted seemed to melt from within over a few short days. Hair falling out, skin turning moist and gray and then shedding off. Bones and teeth brittle and cracking. I’ve almost suppressed the last glimpse I caught of my mother, frail and rotting, as she was loaded onto a bus and driven off to die. Dad was gone when I woke up the morning before.

I had enlisted within forty-eight hours. Push-ups and square meals and cots. Within the month, as the virus spread ever farther, ever faster, my cursory training was over and I was rated with a .223 rifle and small arms and detonators.

They gave us gas masks and lots of ammunition and the captains spoke with the sergeants and then the sergeants shouted at us. So along with a bunch of other teenaged or twenty-something young men, I laced up my boots, pulled down my mask, and climbed on top of a truck parked across the highway. It had been a pleasant late winter, early spring day. The air was cool but the sun was warm.

When the first few of the dying approached, we fired into the air above them, waved our arms at them to go back. It was a group made up of three women and an older man. Stumbling, they inched ever closer, weak and delirious with sickness. When they were less than a hundred yards away, one of the younger guys, just a hothead kid too young to buy a beer, opened up on them. Then like rabid dogs unleashed, we all did. Shot and killed them where they stood.

At first I tried to blame that kid who opened fire—who opened the way for me to do the same.… But really, I should have thanked him. He freed us all to do what I suppose we had to. And it was mercy, really, shooting those sorry bastards. If he had shot my own mother and father, I would have thanked him. It was awful, what happened to those people, what happened to most everyone. I guess that helped me square up what I thought was righteous against all the rotting, living bodies I’d filled with bullets.

By the third day, things were organized enough to blow the bridges. While some soldier-children kept scanning the roads and occasionally picking off the walking dead, a few other guys and I were lucky enough to be ordered to lay down our arms and scurry around placing charges on each concrete pylon that ran down into the river. No sooner had we finished connecting all the detonation cables than a stone-faced captain connected two wires, flipped a switch, and—not even looking—brought the last bridge crumbling down into the water below. The blast was deafening. As it thundered across the land and a great cloud of dust curled up into the sky, none of us knew how final that act of destruction would prove to be. From that moment on, we were cut off.

I was sitting on the edge of my bed, feet on the cold floor. Pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes, I rose and walked stiffly into the living room. I clicked open the locks on the window and slid it open a couple of feet. Then I pushed the coffee table to one side and lay down flat on my back. The fog crept slowly into the room.

Sometimes in some truly horrific chapters of history you hear about survivors envying the dead. I guess a lot of that depends on how they died. It may be selfish, but beyond my family and the few I was close enough with to call friends, I wouldn’t have traded any life for the agonizing days of that death. Envying the dead, though … who knows? Maybe there is a heaven or a hell. Maybe both. Probably neither, but I knew goddamn well that this life was purgatory, peopled by the lucky few—the saved, the spared … the survivor captives. Out of the fire and into perpetual gray. The funny thing is the suicide rate reached its plateau after only a year or two. At least a doctor told me that during my discharge physical. I doubt anyone had conducted a study in years. Still, we managed to adapt fairly well to the sensory depriving maze. Yet even in the gray new world, every once in a while, people got shot in the back in alleys, just like they always have.

I took in long, slow breaths of the damp, heavy air. My palms found my chest and thighs and cheeks and I let myself believe they were not my hands. They say the first real job was prostitution? Wrong. The first real job was killing in the dark and taking what you wanted.

*   *   *

It was 7
A.M
. I was drunk, sitting on the john, taking a shit. Sleep had not come back, so I had turned again to the bottle. Whiskey had kept me company all through the early-morning hours with one shot of vodka on the side. The vodka was a sort of houseguest. It was just passing through my routine, and I felt sick and pathetic for having bought it. In my mind, a red-dress-wearing Rebecca would be sitting in my candlelit box of a home, sipping liquor and smoking black cigarettes.

But she didn’t smoke. Probably didn’t drink vodka, either. It was just an illusion she had spun that first night, and I didn’t know her from Adam but I had bought the vodka and more food than I had in months even after she’d shown up wearing the trousers and blazer of a prep school prude.

I swayed back and forth on my lonely porcelain throne humming without melody. Then came the worst part, wiping, as bad as it can be. I got the littlest bit of shit on my hand. I almost had a goddamn breakdown right there on the can. I was so fucking pathetic. “Hi, Rebecca,” I said aloud, waving at no one with my fouled right hand. I took a long, noisy pull off the fifth of scotch sitting beside me and then washed my hands repeatedly.

I stumbled into my living room and toppled down onto the couch. Diffuse gray light filled the room, and I thought to rise and take the seven or so steps to bed, knowing I’d soon pass out, but it was just too much.

*   *   *

There was a pounding on the door. I didn’t realize I wasn’t dreaming until I was already fumbling with the locks and it was too late to stop. I looked down, established that I was dressed, and then slapped myself once good and hard across the face before opening the door slowly. Eddie stood there on the landing, looking like hell. I never gave anyone my home address.… Had I given it to poor old Eddie? Too foggy, I had no idea what to make of it. Still drunk and confused. I played it cool.

He came right in. I shuffled aside awkwardly and stood there unsteadily as Eddie surveyed my living arrangements. There was a bottle of scotch lying on its side on the table, uncorked and with a few belts left in it. The rest had poured into me or onto the floor. A pill bottle lay open beside it. Eddie looked at me with deep, sorrowful eyes. His dark brows pressed together as he repeated, “It’s so awful, Tom. It’s just so awful.”

I shut my door and lurched past him, dropping roughly onto the couch. Head pounding … my mouth tasted like pennies and vinegar. Dry as a bone. My right hand kept trembling, and I was sure he was staring at it.

“What, uh … What seems to be the problem, Ed?” I mumbled hoarsely.

“It’s all gone now. So awful. All of it gone or thrown across the floor. My life has been taken from me and thrown across the floor. I can’t believe it.”

“Care for a drink?” I smiled beneath bleary eyes, righting the whiskey bottle and sliding it toward him.

“It’s nine thirty in the morning!” he exclaimed with dignity free of disdain.

“Well, don’t tell my dead mother.” I winced immediately after saying this. Nonetheless, I took a long pull off the bottle and then was racked by ragged coughs. I doubled over, spitting and choking as Eddie stood there, looking like a priest in a whorehouse.
Trust this sorry son of a bitch?
he must have been thinking.

“Sorry, Ed. Not at my best in the mornings.” I lit a cigarette, despite every bit of logic piercing through my drunk-cum-hangover haze telling me not to, and sat upright. “I’m okay, though. I’m okay. What’s going on?”

He looked away for a while, as if weighing his options, and then looked me square in the eyes. “Every single bit of material I have left has been stolen, destroyed, or just … just thrown on the warehouse floor.”

“Fuck,” I muttered.

“It’s thousands of things. Thousands of papers, pictures, discs, film reels, books. Lord, you name it.” He sat down on the edge of the table, carefully avoiding the spilled whiskey. “There’s no way, Tom, no way that any one person could have done this in one night. I was there until eight yesterday. I got in at seven this morning. It’s awful. I’m all finished now. Ruined.”

He sat still for a long while, staring at the gray void outside my window. Then he slowly, deliberately raised both hands to his face, lowered his elbows onto his knees, and cradled his head in his palms, swaying gently from side to side.

This was madness. Impossible. The place was huge. It would take all night just to open every file much less rifle through them. I was worthless right now—operating at 20 percent or less. I needed sleep, water, a shower. Time. I was confused, and frankly, I was frightened.
It’s just the booze and the pills,
I said to myself, taking a few feverish drags off my smoke and then dropping it, still smoking, into the crowded ashtray. I had to get Eddie out of here. Had to clean up and then get the facts straight. And Rebecca—I had to deal with her shit. Nothing much in my life for years and then fuck. I was slipping—but it felt more like being pulled.

“Ed … how did you find me here?”

“Hm?” he muttered, his face still covered by his hands.

“How did you know where I live?”

“You told me. And your note,” he said as if I had asked him what my own name was. He straightened up, reached into his jacket pocket, and handed me a small, tightly folded piece of paper. On it was my address. My building, my floor. It was my shitty handwriting. When the fuck did I give him my address?

I shook my head. “Okay. We’ll see, all right? We’ll see about it all.” I rose and told him I’d come by later. At the door, he looked past me once more at my rotten little place, and then at me.

“You found the place okay, right?” He looked confused. “My apartment, I mean.”

“Oh … yes. Of course.”

“Great. Good. Okay … I’ll come by—I promise.”

He left and I shut the door. Locked it back up. Stumbled into my bedroom and collapsed.
Too hazy to think right now.
Sleep was coming.
What’s going on here, Ed?
There were no numbers on my apartment’s door.

5

I paused after stepping out of the windy vestibule to wipe the dampness off my skin. The lobby of the Science and Development Research Department was a barren affair. You could see where a long reception counter once sat on the linoleum floor of the enormous, empty room. Now it was just a gray outline replaced by a handwritten sign reading,
Research Dept.—Flr 6
.