Author Archive: jsomers

I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

34. Candace

She picked up the bottle and splashed whiskey into her glass, her hands shaking a little. She felt like everything was receding from her, like there was no ground, no floor. First there had been the visions and the false memories and the sense that her life wasn’t real, wasn’t what was supposed to be. Then there was meeting the man she’d been seeing in her head, a man she’d never met yet felt like she knew. But now he wasn’t as she remembered him—or didn’t remember him—and everything felt like it was spinning because nothing made any sense, not her real life, not her hallucinations, and not her present tense.

She gulped a swallow of whiskey. She didn’t know anything about fine Scotch, but this was a smooth, slightly smoky dram and while she didn’t think any whiskey was necessarily worth this much money, she had to admit it sure beat the sour mash she normally drank when in the mood.

Looking around, she saw everyone in a new light. All the people were more or less in subtle uniform: Black shirts, jeans, boots, field jackets. Now that she was paying attention, they were all armed; she caught glimpses of shoulder holsters, ankle holsters, bulges under arms.

And none of them were drinking. Every table was laden with untouched drinks.

She swallowed the rest of the whiskey in her glass, willing the warm splash in her belly to spread, to steady her. She took a deep breath.

Sometimes you just gotta step in it, she heard her father say.

“Why do you need an army, Mike?”

Mike and Jimmy exchanged glances, and then they both looked at Glen. Irritation bloomed inside her. These three men had obviously been planning something, and now they shared secrets and she’d just witnessed a flash committee meeting deciding just how much they would tell Candace Cuddyer, who was apparently a junior member of the elite Reality Distortion Club.

“You know what … well, I’ll use the word happened because there really isn’t a better one,” Mike said with a grin she found achingly familiar and endearing. “You know what happened here—right here, in this bar, on this exact night, right?”

“Jack McCoy, dead,” Jimmy said.

“All of us, confined and abused,” Glen added.

Mike leaned forward intently. “And why? Because they have a machine that reads the math of the universe and told them the four of us were a danger.”

“No due process,” Glen said, shaking his head.

“And then I changed everything,” Haggen added, picking up the bottle and examining it. “I changed a variable in a line of code and here we are.”

“Candace,” Mike said as softly as the low roar of the place allowed. “Isn’t there something you’d like to change? Something you’d like to make different about your life? This is a chance to do that.”

Something cracked inside her, and she felt herself tremble. Don’t cry, she hissed internally. Don’t you fucking cry you stupid bitch. Tears made no sense; she wasn’t sad, or scared. She was angry.

“You hired an army so we could steal the … the thing. The black box. And change reality.”

“To what we want,” Glen said, leaning back and folding his hands over his belly. His expression was smug. “We each get to change something. One variable. Something that will make a difference.”

Julia. Candace suddenly remembered the name, remembered him telling her about someone he’d lost, someone he’d loved. Something you’d like to change. This was projection, she thought. This was Mike justifying his own selfishness. He wanted to re-write his own history, and he hoped she would have a similar motivation so he would be able to say that he wasn’t alone, that he wasn’t driving this.

And she did, she guessed. She knew the black box worked, after all; she had the false memories to prove it. In another reality, a Dipping Bird had pressed the ENTER key on a keyboard, and everything had changed. One variable altered, and she’d left town instead of hanging around, and if things had gone more or less similarly since that point of divergence, that was her fault, wasn’t it?

What if she changed something else?

She thought about her father. Of course, her father. Cancer was a death sentence unless it was caught early, and pancreatic cancer was worse than most, remaining in stealth mode until it was literally too late. But what if she had paid closer attention? What if she hadn’t dismissed his exhaustion, his weight loss, the flat look in his eyes? What if she hadn’t left to go to school, and had been in constant contact with him, able to detect the tiny changes that seemed to suddenly coalesce into a terminal diagnosis?

What if she had a whole false memory of his diagnosis and death warning her? She struggled to think about how her real life and her false memories lined up, when the break really was. Had it been after he was already sick? How far back would she have to push the reset in order to save him? And would it make any difference? If she managed to get him to the right doctor at the right time, get the right test, would it save him?

Did it matter? Didn’t she have to try?

She looked at Mike. He was staring at her steadily, his expression hard to read. Except it wasn’t, because they were both thinking about dead people they felt they could have saved, somehow, if only different decisions had been made, different choices taken. She saw her father, thin and yellowed, weak and without any sort of spark of life. Twice now, in a sense, she’d seen him die. Once she’d been here, in his life every day but she hadn’t known to pay attention. The second time she’d moved away and he’d withered while she’d been busy wasting time. If she knew what was coming, and changed something … some detail of her life that would keep her home but have her eyes open to what was happening, and she got him into the right care … she knew from her research that the five-year survival rate for Stage I was more than 60%.

Five years. She thought about five more years with Dad. She heard him saying, well, it ain’t nothing.

She looked at Jimmy and wondered what he would change. He’d already done it once, but under duress and maybe not quite believing it would work, or fully understanding the code. Then she looked at Mr. Eastman, and wondered about him. How far back would they go? What was their biggest regret? Mr. Eastman was in his sixties, she thought; his variable might go back fifty years. What kind of repercussions would there be?

And what if Jimmy’s regret was her?

She swallowed a rusty, panicked taste. She and Jimmy hadn’t been anything but terse friends for a long time. He showed up at the bar and drank until she had to drive him home. He called her “Candy” because he knew it annoyed her. He was a constant asshole thorn in her side.

But he was always around. He was always around.

The idea that Jimmy Haggen’s biggest regret, the variable he would change if he had time to think it through, was their Prom night breakup, his decision to pursue Sarah Mulligan’s heavy tits filled her with a horror more pure than anything she’d ever experienced before. She knew on some level that if he hadn’t abandoned her that night—and he wouldn’t have had to be even nice, she would have gladly accepted civil—she would have slept with him. And stayed with him for some unknowable length of time.

Stealing a glance at Jimmy, she found him smiling at her as he savored his whiskey. She shivered.

She looked back at Mike and took a deep breath.

“No.”

An expression of confusion flickered across his face. “What?”

She leaned back and crossed her arms over her belly. “No. I’m not going along with some insane plan to just randomly change something about our lives in the vague and creepy hope that all the other variables line up and make our lives better.” She shook her head. “You—none of you—haven’t thought this through. You remember as well as I do what’s at that facility up the road—”

“Soldiers,” Glen Eastman snapped. “Coming here in a little while to take us prisoner.”

She turned excitedly towards her former teacher. “A goddamn supercomputer they used to make sure they’d calculated all the possible ramifications.” She pounded the table. “Dammit, don’t you boys remember that the reason they sent the soldiers instead of just adjusting our variables was because they couldn’t control the outcome? They couldn’t predict what would happen?” She turned to offer Jimmy a withering look that made him blink and sit up straighter in surprise. “And you think you can do that without the supercomputer?”

“Candy—” Haggen started to say, but she plucked the glass from his hand, slammed the whiskey, and stood up.

“You’re all crazy. All this,” she gestured around the room. “All this just to fix something? You’re such fucking men it’s incredible. You think you know everything. You think you can fix everything. And you think you don’t have to read the fucking manual. Jesus.”

She started to walk towards the door.

“You realize we each had our second chance and we fucked it up just as much. You think a third go will be any different?” she snorted. “You’re kidding yourselves.”

Mike was in front of her then, hands up in a placating gesture. “Wait! Wait, please?” He backed away from her, giving her space. She hesitated.

“Can we just talk for a moment?” he said. “Go outside, where it’s quieter, and just talk about this before you do anything?”

She chewed her lip. But there was still a lingering sense that this guy, this mysterious super rich Mike Malloy, was a good guy. She nodded. “I was going outside anyway.”

He smiled, and stepped aside, eyes sweeping the room. “Five minutes, he said. “It’s all I ask.”

Outside, she hugged herself against the chill and walked a few feet from the place. The noise level dropped, and when she turned to look at Mike she could say “You know Jimmy’s gonna drink all your expensive hooch while you’re out here” without raising her voice.

He grinned. “I’m getting used to the Haggen Way. He’s a smart guy, actually. Smarter than he looks.”

Candace nodded. “That should be on his tombstone. James Haggen: He was smarter than he looked.”

They smiled at each other. Then he cleared his throat. “I thought … I thought if you came, if you showed up, you’d be on board. I thought, why else would she come?”

She frowned. “Mike, if you think you’re gonna be able to control this, to make it work for you, you’re kidding yourself.”

He nodded. “We’ve been thinking on this a long time, Candace. We’ve made lists of things to change, mapped out relationships.”

She studied his face. It was a good face, she thought, a face that had been through some stuff, a face she could get used to. But there was a confidence there that was off. It reminded her of her older, religious relatives, that certainty that they knew, that they had the answers when it made no sense. She thought Mike had spent a long time in the wilderness, and now he’d seen a way to make sure that the wilderness never existed in the first place. And he was going to grab it with both hands.

“Mike, you can’t possibly do the work that needs to be done. You can’t.”

He shook his head. “You wouldn’t take the chance? To have—” he hesitated a moment, then brightened, and she knew he’d gotten one of those familiar flashes of a life never lived. “To have your father back? You’re really going to walk away?”

She nodded. “I’m sorry, Mike. I really am. But this is crazy.”

He nodded, and his eyes flicked up, looking over her for a moment. She had the strange feeling he wasn’t nodding at her. “Then I’m sorry, Candace. But if we’re right—and I think we are—then Dr. Raslowski and Colonel Hammond and the rest are up at that facility right now. And they expect the four of us to be in this bar tonight, so they can come and detain us.”

She felt hands on her arms. She tried to twist away, but they were too many, and too strong.

“Which means I can’t let you go.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

33. Mike

It started after Julia.

At first he’d thought it was just trauma, just his brain’s way of dealing with what had happened—imagining that it hadn’t really happened, that maybe he was living in some sort of extended dream. The sense of unreality, the memories of things that had never actually happened—he thought he was losing his mind.

It sobered him up.

Well, it had helped sober him up. Robbie basically kidnapping him into rehab had helped, too. For twenty-eight days he’d seen twin visions as he shook and sweated and shit himself: Julia, prone on the floor, convulsed in mid-crawl, and another woman, a sturdy, pretty girl in tight jeans, looking at him like he was crazy. The specificity of the expression he saw was what made him think it wasn’t just a slow-motion stroke, or creeping insanity. He knew that look.

Everyone, including Robbie—who, in addition to being his lawyer and financial advisor was also pretty much his only friend—thought he should stay in rehab. It was a luxury facility, more like staying at an expensive hotel than a treatment center, especially once he got past withdrawal and could eat solid food again. The doctors all said the same thing: The standard four-week stay was just the tip of the iceberg, and some huge percentage of people who checked out right away relapsed within a few months. The math was simple: The longer he stayed, the better his chances of staying sober.

The math. Every time he heard the word, something inside him went click.

He didn’t want to stay sober, though. He just didn’t want to be an addict any more. No one seemed to believe him when he said there was a difference.

He left anyway, but one piece of advice from his doctor he agreed with was that it would be best to get away from the old familiar haunts, the clubs and bars, the hotel rooms, his old apartment off of Central Park. Too many familiar faces eager to sell him something, eager to invite him out, eager to share their own stash, eager to introduce him to women who might take his mind off of Julia.

He didn’t want his mind taken off of Julia. He wanted to remember her, and he forced himself to remember her on the floor, in her panties, crawling. That was what would keep him straight.

And so, he’d made arrangements through Robbie, and hit the road.

He laid awake a lot of nights thinking about her and trying to pinpoint where it had all gone wrong. Because him and Julia had started off good. Fun. They’d both been pretty wild, twenty-five, and if Julia wasn’t rich she was pretty and in Manhattan a pretty girl could live a wild life without a dime to her name. But she was up front about it. She didn’t pretend. She knew it was a transaction every night in every club, every bar, every penthouse party. Not sex, necessarily, but her presence, her looks, her flirting. 10He liked that she saw herself honestly and didn’t make any attempt to kid anyone.

And for a long time, years even, they’d had fun. It had been a party, and he’d felt young and smart, smarter than everyone else. He knew all the secret codes, the names for everything, the places it could be acquired, the pricing and the people to trust. Even the epic hangovers, sitting miserable in coffee shops and diners with sunglasses on, everything making him nauseous, felt like a secret club. He prided himself on his recovery. No matter how bloated and sweaty and sick he was in the morning or afternoon, by midnight he was right as rain and ready to hit it hard again, and Julia not only kept up she often set the pace.

And then it got a hand on them, and it became a job. The hangovers got worse, but there was always an easy cure. Slowly, everything began to revolve around supply and demand, with the demand getting deeper and deeper and the supply never enough. Everything became a blur and he knew that on some deep intimate level he’d been aware of the irony that he was rich enough to not need a job but he was working a hundred hours a week just to feel normal.

Julia used to talk about leaving New York. On their bad days, the mornings when they were both sick but couldn’t get anyone they knew on the phone and had to start putting out desperate feelers to strangers and once-met acquaintances, she would pace around the apartment in her underwear, chain smoking, and chatter on and on about getting out of the city. She thought the city was sick and was infecting them. The bad air, the evil people, the easy drugs. She would say, let’s go to a cabin. Let’s get in a car and go to a cabin and dry out together and then go around the country, the world. Travel. The secret, she said, was keeping busy. If you were always on the move you couldn’t get bored and if you weren’t bored you wouldn’t need anything else.

And then they would finally score, make a connection, and the idea of travel and leaving the city would go away. He made it go away, because he couldn’t imagine being away from the city, from his apartment, his friends, his connections.

The apartment. He remembered the first day back at the place after rehab. The state of it had shocked him. The grime and the smell, the disarray. The rotting food in the fridge. He’d left everything. He made arrangements for a cleanout and a cleaning service, told Robbie to sell the place for whatever he could get for it, and never went back.

He knew he’d killed her. If he’d said, yes, let’s go to a cabin, let’s leave the city, let’s travel they might never have changed their lives, but she wouldn’t have died on the floor of that disgusting, dirty apartment. If he’d just been willing to leave, to change, to get off the roller coaster for five minutes and catch his breath, they’d probably be getting fat and ugly in some hotel in Budapest right now, irritated because no one was selling anything worth taking. Sick, maybe, unhappy maybe, but alive.

Driving around, ditching rental cars and hopping on trains, walking and hitchhiking, he had a lot of time to think. People were always trying to start up conversations, but he preferred to just sit and think. Being sober was a novelty at first. He’d hesitated about alcohol, and the10n one night alone in a ski resort hotel in Alaska, almost completely empty, he’d gone down to the bar and ordered a whiskey and when it didn’t kill him or send him running in the snow looking for someone to sell him a few rocks, he’d had another, and then gone to bed.

Everyone told him that control was an allusion. They told him at the center, you’re an addict. You think you can control it, but you can’t. Sobriety is an all-or-nothing proposition. You’re either sober or you’re not.

That night, in the nearly-empty resort, he’d decided to not be sober. And it didn’t kill him.

Clearheaded, he thought the visions would start to fade. The faces he saw, the places, the violence that came in flashes, guns and blood and bodies. He thought they were either trauma-related, and would fade as he distanced himself from that awful, terrible moment, waking up and seeing her on the floor and knowing somehow immediately that she was dead. Or that they were an extension of his drug-augmented reality, a stretching of his brain cells that had become semi-permanent, and that would fade as boring normality settled back in.

But the visions persisted. Grew stronger. He found himself doubting reality, expecting to be able to reach out and peel away what he saw, revealing a near-empty bar out in the woods, men and women in uniforms with no insignia, carrying assault weapons. He felt like he was in some sort of simulation, a Matrix. He would close his eyes one day and see the source code, glowing and green, and be able to manipulate it.

He came across One-Eyed Jack’s by accident.

He’d been sitting in a diner, empty plates turning cold and crusty, nursing a fourth cup of coffee while he read idly on his tablet. His next adventure, he thought, would involve hunting. He’d never been hunting, never killed an animal or learned how to skin it and butcher it, and that seemed like a handy skill to have. He wasn’t sure how he felt about killing and eating something that you saw with your own eyes, alive and aware, and he thought that was something everyone should have as well. If you were going to eat the breakfast sausage, you should at least be settled in your mind whether killing something for food was okay or not.

Light research led him, somehow, to a web page offering the Ten Best Hidden Bars, and number eight on the list was One-Eyed Jack’s, “… a perfectly hidden dive where the bartender/owner will sit down at your table and tell you tall tales about his hunting exploits, the beer is cold, the music on the jukebox at least twenty years out of date, and the burgers only so-so, but the atmosphere and location can’t be beat for off-the-beaten-path interest.”

The photo of the place hit him like a punch: He knew the place. He’d never been, but if he closed his eyes he was able to imagine it, and even picture the owner, Jack McCoy. Except when he pictured him, he was dead, lying in a pool of his own blood.

He paid the bill and was on the phone before he got back to his rental car, working on hiring a guide to take him around for a hunting lesson, that would end at One-Eyed Jack’s. He had a buzzing feeling of energy, as if something he’d been planning for his whole life was about to co10me off.

On the road a day later, the name Jimmy Haggen ringing in his head after being connected to the man as a potential guide, he’d called up Robbie.

“Jesus, Mike, where are you?”

“On the road. Heading south, going hunting.”

Robbie paused. Mike knew his lawyer, his friend, was running out of patience. “Look, Mike, you know I’m on your side and I want to help. But it’s been thirteen months. Thirteen months I’m opening your mail and fielding your phone calls, transferring funds, putting people off. I want to help, but I’m not your secretary? Okay?”

Mike grimaced. “Robbie—I’m sorry. I hear you, I really do. And I’m sorry—I apologize. And I’ll make it up to you. But I have one more thing I have to ask you do for me. Something I can only trust you to do.”

There was silence on the line, and Mike could picture his fat, red-faced lawyer, his black hair too long and hanging in his face, breathing hard, biting his chubby pink lip as he thought. Mike could picture the tiny wood-heavy office that Robbie lived in, piled high with paper despite repeated announcements of “going digital,” the walls covered with framed photos of Robbie and everyone he’d ever had a conversation with. Robbie, big, friendly, reliable. He’d known Rob for twenty years and they’d been through some adventures together.

“All right, Mikey,” Robbie said, using the diminutive he favored whenever he put aside his professional demeanor and treated him solely as a friend. “All right. What do you need?”

Mike remembered steering with one hand, the phone in the other, watching a storm approach on the Interstate. “An army, Robbie,” he said. “I need to hire an army.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

32. Candace

Sitting in the backseat with Jimmy Haggen was like time-traveling backwards ten or fifteen years. She half expected to look down and find herself wearing the pale gold prom dress she’d somehow convinced herself was the height of fashion in her youth. Except they weren’t in the world’s grossest rented limousine, a soggy boat that stank of other parties, other mistakes, and Jimmy wasn’t already red-faced drunk and disinterested in her, cold and distracted, and they weren’t crammed in with two other couples in equally disastrous fashions and states of sobriety. With her thigh pressing against his, though, the memory was persistent, and she remembered—with incredible specificity and clarity—how badly she wanted Jimmy that night, how determined she was to end the magical evening with him on top of her, inside her, doing everything they could think of.

Adding to the surreality of it all, they were headed to a midnight rendezvous with her old Phys Ed teacher, Mr. Eastman, a man who’d been a rotund, bespectacled pudge fifteen years ago and who was now retired and, she imagined, sitting around Jack’s every night hunting for people who hadn’t heard his war stories about unruly, disrespectful kids, the horrors of the Designated Hitter Rule, and why the federal government technically had no authority to collect taxes.

As she recalled, for a man who never broke a sweat in her eyesight, Glen Eastman had been quite the armchair sportsman, and had often walked around wearing an old fishing vest despite having never been on the water in his life.

She studied the back of Mike Malloy’s head. On top of everything else—remembering things and people that had never happened, a strong feeling that she’d been wasting time and sitting idle for six years and only now were things sliding back into place—she’d never felt so instantly comfortable with someone before. Five years ago—three, if she was being honest—she would have thought something terribly clichéd and boring like love at first sight or soul mates or something awful like that—not seriously, maybe, but sort of. Now she wondered if it was just an alternate reality she could still almost reach out and touch, a life that had been surgically removed from her through, of all things, mathematics.

Fucking math, she thought. I always knew math was out to get me.

She wondered if that was what love was, or at least the soul-matey movie kind people sometimes swore they found. Maybe love was just people who’d shared an aborted reality, suddenly running into each other on the street and realizing that this, this was what they should have been doing all this time.

Whatever else, whether she believed what was happening or not, this much she knew: She was supposed to be in this car with her first boyfriend and Mike Malloy.

One-Eyed Jack’s was lit up and loud when they pulled into the parking lot, which was disorienting. She’d worked there for years and every night had been Tuesday night, largely quiet and empty, with the only music what the old, cranky jukebox provided. But here was One-Eyed Jack’s pulsing with life and noise. As they got out of the car and approached the familiar building out in the middle of nowhere it was achingly familiar and completely different all at once, a place she knew better than any other in the world except maybe her father’s house, and yet it was the polar opposite of her experience.

At the door, they were stopped by a burly guy she didn’t recognize, a shaggy dog of a man wearing reflective Aviator sunglasses at night, wearing various pieces of denim, his long, greasy hair in his face, chains and other unnecessary accouterments hanging from his pants and jacket.

“Sorry, guys,” he said. “We’re at capacity.”

Candace was about to push past Mike and demand to see Jack McCoy when Phil Eastman appeared at the door. He wasn’t wearing his usual fishing vest; instead he had on what looked like an all-black jogging suit, his eyes bulging behind his thick glasses. He moved with an air of assurance, though, that she didn’t remember. Instead of the slightly ridiculous former teacher who’d been the World Record holder for Least Athletic Physical Education Teacher, here was an older man who moved with a confidence and assurance she didn’t recognize.

“It’s all right, Benji,” he said, clapping Denim Man on the shoulder. “They’re with me.”

“Okay, Mr. Eastman,” Benji said, grinning and sweeping his hand towards the door. “Go on in!”

Candace blinked. She knew Benji—Benjamin Louhy. She’d been one year ahead of him in school, and while they’d never been friends they’d had a dozen conversations over the years. She hadn’t seen him since she left town, and as she floated past him between Jimmy and Mike, she felt paralyzed: Certain he would recognize her, unwilling to take the first step.

“Hey, Jim,” Benji said. “Sorry about that.”

“No worries, Benj,” Jimmy said cheerfully. “We’re probably gonna end up burning this place down tonight, anyway.”

Inside, she felt dizzy. The aisles between the wobbly tables she’d once swanned through like a boss were jammed with people. Every table was taken, and people were standing everywhere. A makeshift stage had been built in one corner, a tiny triangle of raised floor, and a three-piece band was knocking out some pretty decent country-flavored rock. No one was dancing. Most amazing of all, there were two waitresses working the shift, something she’d never experienced in all her years living in the area and working there. It blew her mind.

Everyone, she noticed, was wearing black.

Once she noticed it, she couldn’t unsee it: Every single patron, including Glen, was wearing a black ensemble. It was a sea of hipsters, and she had to suppress a sudden urge to giggle at the thought: Somehow, under her radar, Jack’s had become the new hip place, and people were driving in from miles around to check it out. The thought was so hilariously unlikely she didn’t know how to deal with it.

“Come on,” Glen said. “I have a table.”

They sat down at one of the refreshingly familiar old tables, heavily varnished wood that had been carved and water-stained so often it was like a rock formation. One of the waitresses, an unfamiliar woman with bleached hair and a layer of foundation that didn’t quite hide the rash of pimples all over her cheeks, came over and slapped down some napkins.

“What can I get y’all?” she shouted.

Candace had the tingling, buzzing sense of deja vu, and then Mike leaned forward and held out a black credit card. She heard the words 1955 Glenfarclas before he shouted “You’ve got a 1955 Glenfarclas behind the bar!”

She blinked, taking the card with an air of wonder. “We do?”

He nodded. “Bring the bottle, four glasses, a bowl of ice, four glasses of water!”

The band swung into a frenzied climax, and with an A power chord and a smash of drums they were done. There was applause that felt kind of polite and rote, and then the volume dropped to a low roar. She felt drunk. She’d packed up and come home because of a persistent subconscious sense of wrongness in her life. And now she was here with her high school boyfriend and a stranger she wanted to tell secrets to and her old teacher. The least successful bar in history was packed to the rafters and yet as she watched, none of the black-clad customers seemed all that interested. And as she looked around, she noticed something else: None of them were drinking.

They all had drinks. Pitchers of beer, filled glasses, bottles. But no one picked anything up as she watched. No one even touched the glasses, and the beer all seemed flat and warm to her professional eye. She’d spent her whole life monitoring bars, after all. There was so much off in Jack’s she couldn’t even come up with what bothered her the most.

“Glen,” Mike said, “why not fill Candace in on what you’ve been up to?”

Glen Eastman nodded and smiled at her. She blinked, seeing him with his hands ziptied behind his back.

“Candy, how are you, sweetheart?” Glen said, smiling warmly. “I suppose you’re like the rest of us—been feeling and seeing things that seem like they happened, but can’t remember anything actually?”

She nodded, feeling overwhelmed. It was like everything she’d ever known in her life had been changed, flipped.

“Jimmy and I’ve been discussing that for years now. And after a while, we decided we weren’t crazy—believe me, we considered the possibility pretty seriously. But I suggested to Jim, if we’re crazy, then we’re crazy. No harm then in doing a little investigating. We had these … visions, I guess. A life never led, people and events that hadn’t yet happened. So, I suggested we take those things seriously on a contingent basis. Let’s do our research. Find out if the faces we each remembered, the bits and pieces, linked up to something that actually existed.”

“We found it it all did,” Jimmy said.

“For the last few months I’ve been posted up in a deer blind across from that old factory,” Glen said, smiling. “Just me and some binoculars and a phone. And two months ago, this one showed up with a crew.”

He pulled his phone out of his vest pocket, thumbed it, and turned it around for her to see.

She recognized the face. It was in Jimmy’s notebook, an older man, angry-looking, wearing glasses. She knew the face, even though she’d never seen it before.

Glen nodded. “Me too. We all remember him. He showed up with two tractor trailers full of equipment and a swarm of people. They began working on the place like crazy, and a few days later, she showed up.”

He thumbed the phone and held it out again. Candace recognized the woman, too; older, fierce-looking, with a short military-style haircut and a piercing stare.

“You recognize these people, too, I can tell.” Eastman said. “Me and Jimmy, we weren’t sure what to do, and then Mr. Malloy showed up, like an old friend we couldn’t neither of us remember.”

“And Mr. Malloy had a plan,” Jimmy said.

Candace felt her stomach dropping. She looked at Mike. She had a feeling that everything was about to come together and make a little more sense. She also had a feeling she wasn’t going to necessarily like it.

The waitress returned, carrying a tray with the bottle of Scotch, four glasses, ice, and water. Candace admired her technique as she set everything up; the girl had some experience, she thought, and knew how to handle herself. When she’d finished laying everything out she stood up and, to Candace’s amazement, did something that could only be described as a little curtsy, bending her legs and nodding her head.

“Y’all let me know if you need anything else,” she said, and spun away.

Guess she doesn’t see too many black cards in here, Candace thought sourly, then hated herself. Guess you haven’t either.

When the waitress was gone, Mike leaned forward, his eyes locked on her. She liked his eyes, but there was something in his expression she didn’t like, though she couldn’t put her finger on what it was, precisely. Something haunted.

“We’re not going to sit here and wait for it to happen again, for them to come and grab us,” Mike said. “We’re going to take the facility. Pre-emptive. We’re going to take the lot of them, and take possession of their little Reality-bending machine.”

She blinked. Then she shook her head. “That’s crazy. You remember the same things I do. They have soldiers there. Assault weapons. God knows what we didn’t see.” She looked around and leaned forward. “Mike, we can’t take the facility. We don’t have the resources.”

Mike shook his head. “You’re wrong, Candace. Me and Jim and Glen, we’ve been planning for this.”

“Candy,” Jimmy said, picking up the bottle and pouring himself a generous drink. “Take a look around. All these people in here? Every single one of them? Work for our rich benefactor here, Mr. Mike Malloy.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

31. Mike

He stared down into his glass. Bourbon, and not the best bourbon either—though he was probably spoiled on that account. Black credit cards meant you could be one of those people who insisted on his favorite whiskey wherever he went, even if the bar or restaurant or hotel had to send someone on a lengthy road trip to fetch it.

You’re going where? Robbie had asked him. For god’s sake, why? You just got back from the Mike Malloy Finds Himself Tour!

He looked up nervously and realized he still didn’t have an answer that would make any sense to anyone.

“How long have you—” Candace started to say.

Haggen cut her off. “I set this place up three, four months ago,” he said. “This was some Field of Dreams shit, wasn’t it?”

She shrugged, staring at Mike. “I don’t know what it is, frankly. For me, it was all kind of sub-conscious, you know? Feelings. A few images. What about you?”

Mike frowned. “For me it was more coherent, I guess. I spent the last year or so traveling around—it’s a long story. I felt compelled to just keep moving, and I made arrangements with people to learn things, you know? I was restless. And I wanted to be a better person, more in the moment, more capable.” He grimaced. “I sound like an asshole, don’t I?”

“Definitely,” Haggen said, grinning around his own tumbler of bourbon. “Like a rich asshole, though, if that helps.”

“Wait a sec,” Candace said. “You guys know each other?”

Mike nodded. He liked her. She had a Look; it was experience, years, but not in a bad way. Like wearing off some of the tread had honed her, revealed something better underneath. “Like I said, my plan, such as it was, involved driving around and, well, hiring people. A few weeks learning how to hot wire a car, a few days learning how to weld. Anything, really.”

Jimmy snorted. “So one day I get a call from some New York asshat named Rob Kittle, asking me if I want to make some money teaching some other New York asshat to hunt and track and, you know, not kill themselves in the wild,” Jimmy said. “And, seeing as I have the fucking state up my ass about back taxes, it was an opportune moment to relieve Mr. Malloy, Millionaire, here of his cash.”

Mike smiled. “So I came down here and we met at One-Eyed Jack’s, and … it’s hard to explain.”

“You felt like you already knew Jim?” Candace said.

Mike looked at her, smiling. “Exactly. Him and Glen Eastman.”

Candace blinked, her face crumpling into confusion. She looked at Jimmy, and Mike felt a pang of jealousy. “Mr. Eastman?”

Jimmy nodded. “It makes sense,” he said. “Give it a moment. Think about it.”

Mike watched her, and saw her working through it just as he had—though for him it was worse, eh figured, because he didn’t know any of these people. Except he did.

“We started talking, and we’re both freaked out,” he said, and Haggen nodded. “We’re both fighting this weird sense that we’ve met, that this is important, that we’ve been sort of hanging around waiting for this. And then Glen comes up and just sits down and he’s doing the same thing. And we started trading stories—things we’ve been thinking, like mantras. Images that keep repeating.”

Candace nodded. “I keep seeing … that old Dipping Bird from Jack’s,” she said, sounding hesitant, he thought, like this was the first time she’d risked saying it out loud.

Jimmy sighed. “Well, me and Glen … we had this moment a long time ago. I’ve been keeping a journal. Anything that seems related—random thoughts, weird dreams, deja vu—I wrote it down. Glen did the same.”

Mike cleared his throat as Jimmy stood up. “We’ve been comparing notes, and we’ve pieced some things together—things that we all agree on, things we’ve all seen or thought repeatedly.”

Jimmy picked up an old-school marble notebook and brought it over to her. “I tried to make it a little neater.” He turned and looked at Mike and winked. “I always was a kiss-ass in school. Candy will tell you.”

She opened the book. Mike knew what it looked like at first glance: Insanity. Haggen had filled every line with neat block printing that felt like a horror movie prop, occasionally spicing things up with doodles and surprisingly complex and detailed diagrams, and sketches of several people that had been rendered with eerie, lifelike realism, including a hard-faced older woman, a pretty younger woman with bright red hair, and an older man, scowling unhappily. It was disturbing, and if Mike had seen it in a courtroom he would have voted guilty without hearing another word.

But, he recognized most of it.

Not in a literal way. He couldn’t say he’d ever actually met those people, or heard the terms transmorgrifier or Raslowski Field. But the moment he saw them or read them, he realized he was familiar with them. The best way he’d figured out how to describe the sensation was a conversation in the next room overheard as you were falling asleep: Occasionally a phrase or word would carry through to your dreams, and haunt you.

He watched Candace read and sipped whiskey. He’d never seen her before, but yet the moment she’d arrived at the door he’d known her, he’d felt comfortable with her, like something was slipping into place. And now that she was sitting here, he couldn’t imagine her anywhere else.

Her face told a story, starting with skepticism, bleeding into surprise, and finally settling into a mask of intense concentration. When she finished, she looked from Jimmy to him.

“Jesus,” she breathed. “Did any of that really happen?”

Mike shook his head. “Nope.”

“But I almost remember it. Almost.”

Mike waited a beat. He was about to say things he’d been thinking for weeks, for months now, but he knew that on one level they were insane things.

“That’s because they really happened,” he said. “And then they got changed.”

The words hung in the air for a moment, heavy.

“It took me a while, too,” he went on, swirling whiskey in his glass. “Once you think of it, though, it’s the only thing that makes sense. Hell, we’re here because it all really happened. I came here because I’ve been here before, in a sense. Jimmy was here at this cabin because this is where he … ended things before. You came back because you were here when it happened. And Glen Eastman’s been waiting for the rest of us, just biding his time.”

“So you think,” she started, then shook her head. “You believe they invented a way of changing reality, of plugging some numbers into a machine and pressing a button and changing the fundamental facts of existence, came here because our names—us—came up in their simulations or whatever, they detained us at One-Eyed Jack’s, we broke free and killed a bunch of soldiers, stole their magic reality box, and came to The Sprawl where I used to shotgun beers while standing in a horse tub, and Jimmy here hacked the box and reset the last few years of our lives?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said, grinning.

“And so do you, or you wouldn’t be here,” Mike added. “And there’s this: It’s all happening again.”

Candace blinked. “What?”

“Like he said, Glen’s been obsessing over this shit for years now. He’s been keeping an eye on the old abandoned factory up the road. He says that six months ago, there was a lot of activity—trucks in the middle of the night, workers, soldiers—but you wouldn’t know it to drive by. It looks dead and empty.”

“But the security system is active,” Mike added.

Jimmy nodded. “Right.”

Candace shook her head. “Look, all right, I’ll admit it: I’m here because of something I can’t quite explain. Okay. I remember things that never happened. I remember some of the stuff in this notebook, for god’s sake!”

She tossed the notebook onto the floor. Opened her mouth, then shut it. After a moment, Mike thought she sort of … collapsed, shrinking down into herself. Then she took a deep breath and looked at him. The shock of familiarity was electric.

“Fine. I admit it. I believe it. I can remember a whole different six years. I didn’t leave town, I didn’t fail out of school, I didn’t get a job at Rudy’s on Ninth Avenue. I stayed here, I buried my father, I worked at Jack’s, and one night you walked in and ordered an expensive whiskey and then we were detained.” She nodded, once crisp. “Fine, I admit it.”

“So, we’re in the same situation,” Mike said. “If they’re set up at the facility again, if we’re all here again, then they’re watching us. Which means our names are still coming up in their model. Which means at some point—”

“We’ll find ourselves at One-Eyed Jack’s and they come busting in.”

Jimmy stood up and pointed at her. “Bingo.”

Mike waited. The Candace he didn’t exactly remember would jump at the chance. she wouldn’t want to be left behind, left out. She wouldn’t want to let fate choose her path. If nothing else, she would want to keep her hand on the stick.

After a moment, she nodded. “Okay. I’m not gonna lie; I’m here because something I can’t explain has drawn me here. Fine. Let’s get to the bottom of it. I’m in.”

Mike smiled.

“So what’s the plan?” Candace asked, looking from Mike to Jimmy.

Mike took a breath, but Jimmy beat him to it, draining his glass and slamming it down on the floor.

“Step one,” he said with a grin, “is go get a drink.”

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PART THREE

30. Candace

She startled awake and for a moment didn’t know exactly where she was. The swaying motion, the hot, stuffy air, the soft non-sound of people all around her was all disorienting for a moment.

Jim—

She heard the voice in her head, clear, crisp. Like it had just happened.

She blinked, taking a deep breath and sitting up straighter in the seat. The bus was dim, lit only by the few places where people were using their reading lights. It was hot and it smelled like a soup she’d had once and never wanted to have again.

“Finally awake, huh, darlin’?”

She turned and blinked, memory coming back to her. This guy had gotten on the bus a few miles after her, had stood blocking the aisle for a full minute while he scanned his options, and had lit up like a horny Christmas Tree when he’d spotted her sitting by herself in the window seat. He was forty-ish, jowly and going to fat but not quite there yet, and handsome in a pleasant, unremarkable way. He still wore a class ring, which was all Candace needed to know about him. Literally.

He’d tried chatting her up when he’d settled in, smelling of cigarettes and aftershave, which were strikes two and three against him. She’d managed to feign sleep, and then that had turned into an actual nap. But now she’d tipped her hand and he was eager to continue their non-conversation.

“If you’da told me your city, I woulda made sure you didn’t sleep through it.”

She swallowed, head swimming in a way that was like a migraine without the pain. “I’m good, thanks,” she croaked.

“Where you headed?”

“Home.”

The word satisfied him, and he asked her if it was just a visit or if she was doing something more there.

“Excuse me,” she said, half-standing and indicating the aisle. “Bathroom.”

He smiled and pulled himself out of his seat, stepping aside with a cheery grin to let her past. She imagined he was watching her walking towards the bathroom in the rear, and thought he must be disappointed, because she’d gained so much weight in the last few months she was like a different person. Then again, she also had the feeling he was a guy who wasn’t all that particular.

She stepped into the tight, disgusting bathroom, and shut the door behind her locking it. It was incredibly gross, and not for the first time in her life, she wondered how in the world other people lived. When you couldn’t even manage to pee accurately into a pretty wide target, what business did you have even go out of the house?

Home. She thought about the word. It had been a long time—six years. She didn’t count the trips to the hospital to visit Dad; that had been fifty miles north of what she thought of as home, and she hadn’t come anywhere close to the old house—which she knew needed to be put on the market—One Eyed Jack’s, or the Sprawl on those visits.

She looked at herself in the small, muddy mirror. Thirty-one, and worse for the wear, she thought; New York was supposed to be her reinvention, her big break from the rut. She’d left everything behind—her Dad, all the familiar faces and the safety net of knowing she would be able to work at Jack’s for the rest of her life if she wanted. She remembered the bus trip going the other way, years ago, school enrollment materials stuffed into her backpack, everything she owned in a poorly-packed duffel bag stuffed into the luggage compartment under the bus. She remembered being excited, determined, a little frightened. She remembered being ten pounds lighter and able to fit into the pair of soft jeans she still carried with her everywhere she went as a sort of totem of optimism.

“What are you doing?” she whispered, searching her own face through the tarnish.

She didn’t know. She’d felt it for a while now, the need to go home. She hadn’t consciously made any decisions, even though she hadn’t exactly made New York her bitch. She’d left a job waitressing at a dive bar among people she’d known all her life for a brief stint at school followed by a job waitressing at a dive bar in Hell’s Kitchen among people she still didn’t know very well—not the way she knew everyone at home—and which barely paid for her shitty room in the Three Bedroom Walk Up of Madness, where six girls paid various rents for variously-sized rooms, tepid hot water, no air conditioning, and a constantly-changing cast of roommates.

Except her. Candace had become the House Mother: Oldest, longest tenure, not going anywhere.

She’d drifted. She knew it, she could sense it and it filled her with a slow-motion panic. She was four years away from thirty-five, and she suspected that even in New York thirty-five was when you had to stop pretending you were a kid on an adventure. At that point you were an adult with no money and no long-term plan.

Everything had clarified two weeks ago. She wasn’t supposed to be in New York. She didn’t know how she knew, but there it was: She was supposed to go home. She was supposed to go home.

She kept seeing things—pieces of a dream. She’d had them for a long time, persistent images. The old Dipping Bird from Jack’s. McCoy’s old crossbow. Her ancient, beloved Trailblazer. All of these images came to her in flashes at odd times—sometimes when she was trying to sleep or just waking up, but sometimes when she was awake, working, even talking to other people. She saw them real as day, and every time she did she had that feeling: Go home.

So, she was going home. She’d stiffed her roommates on the rent and taken every dime she had, bought a bus ticket, and here she was, in the world’s filthiest bathroom, forty minutes out from the bus station she never thought she’d ever see again, with the world’s least charming pickup artist waiting patiently for her to return to her seat so he could feign interest in her life goals, though she didn’t know what his endgame for her might be unless—and the thought chilled her—he was getting off at the same spot.

The only thing to do is to do it, her Dad used to say. She smiled faintly at her reflection. As usual, he was right.

Town hadn’t changed much. It was still a single block of two lane highway lined by stores, the tiny police department-cum-jail, and a post office. City Hall was the house of whoever happened to be mayor (it took forty-three votes to win). People came to ?town’ to pick up their mail and put in orders, and even that had slowed down in the Internet age. The bus stopped in front of the post office, waited for her to pull her immense duffel out, then roared off to better, more interesting places. She thought she could see her seatmate staring out the window sadly as it pulled off, but couldn’t be sure.

In Herb’s Hunt and Tackle, you can get just about anything. There might have been a time when they were just a place for bait and rods, guns and camping gear, but they’d expanded into general hardware, car and equipment rentals, dry goods, maps, guide services, and anything else that didn’t have a local business servicing it, which was just about everything. She recognized Herb Junior behind the counter, but he didn’t recognize her; he’d been about sixteen when she’d left town, and their families had never been close. She played the role of tired tourist and rented an ancient old Land Rover. Herb Junior tried to steer her towards a newer Tahoe, saying that the Land Rover had seen a lot of miles, but something about it called to her. It felt familiar and comfortable. She paid cash for a three day rental, tossed her duffel into the back, and took off.

She drove by the house, first. She knew it wasn’t hers any more; there was still a mortgage on it when Dad had died, and selling it wouldn’t leave much for her as an inheritance, but despite the mounting tax bill she hadn’t done anything. Nothing had been done. Nothing looked different. Even the rusting, decades-old swing set her parents had erected when they still hoped for another child and envisioned her playing with her sister or brother was still there, slanted just like always, a lawsuit waiting to happen.

She sat in the car for a moment, studying the place. Had she really lived there for twenty-five years? She tried to think of the last time she’d been there. Before she’d moved, before Dad had gotten sick. It probably hadn’t much of a day to remember. Coffee. Packing. Dad moping about, pretending not to be sad. TV. A beer or two, then bed. She wished she could summon the memories, but they were gone like they’d never happened.

She contemplated the irony that she could easily recall Jack McCoy’s crossbow in perfect detail, but the last day she’d spent in her father’s house was lost.

One Eyed Jack’s was lively. She pulled into the gravel parking lot and let the car idle. A sense of foreboding came over her, and she didn’t want to get out of the car. For what purpose? To see Jack McCoy? She loved the man. She smiled as she thought of him, standing proudly behind his bar, laughing at some joke, a big bear of a guy who always smelled like hamburgers. But she didn’t want to go back in there. She realized she never wanted to go back inside, ever again if she could help it.

Music. The sign had always read MAD ONE JACK’S: Food | Liquor | Live Music, but there had never been any music as long as she’d known the place. But as she sat there she could hear the beat and the spark of guitars. Good for you, Jack, she thought. Don’t ever stand still.

She put the Land Rover into gear and hoped it could handle dirt roads and brush, because she suddenly knew exactly where she was going. Why she’d come back.

Was it a love story? She didn’t think so. It was more than that. Different.

The night closed in and the world became her headlights and the squeak of the old suspension. She remembered the way without any difficulty. Some places became part of your DNA.

When the Sprawl came into view, she was surprised for a moment, because someone appeared to have taken some care with the place. Weak yellow light filled the windows, and smoke chugged from the chimney. The area right outside the main entrance had been cleared, and a neat pile of fresh firewood was piled up against one side. The bulk of the insane cabin stretched away into the darkness as ever.

Three trucks were parked outside.

She parked and killed the lights and the engine. Leaving her duffel in the truck, she got out and walked to the front door, liking the familiar crunch of twigs and dry scrub under her boots.

The door opened before she got there, and Jimmy Haggen, looking skinny and old, somehow, his hair graying, leaned against the jamb.

“Well, heck, Cuddyer,” he said. “Welcome back. Come on in. We been waiting for you.”

She smiled. It was good to see Jimmy, she had to admit. As eager as she’d always been to escape him, as happy as she’d been to have escaped him once, she never went more than a day or so without thinking about him. Why hadn’t she called? Or written? Jesus, she could have at least Friended him, she thought.

“James,” she said, pecking him on the cheek awkwardly as she stepped past him. “I have to admit, I have no idea why I—”

She froze. Standing in the front room of The Sprawl, where she’d partied and made out and danced and smoked illicit cigarettes, was a man. He was about her age, maybe a little older. Nice-looking, but unremarkable. He was wearing a leather coat that looked to cost a few thousand bucks, and he had a worried, sunken expression that was familiar to her because, she realized, she’d been watching it gather on her own face for years now. A certainty that she was not where she should be. Not doing what she should be.

He smiled, and she knew him.

“Hey, Candace,” Mike said.

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below.

27. Mike

“You’re certain he’s heading out that way?”

Candace shrugged. “My father would say, Certain’s a word for morons. Nothing’s certain in this world, Candace.” She glanced at Myra. “Guess we didn’t know how true that was. No, I’m not certain, but I’m pretty sure I know Jimmy. He thinks he’s being smart. A place to hole up for a few days, evade pursuit. Shelter, probably some supplies stashed there because Jimmy’s all about surviving, these days. He won’t go home because he knows they know all about him, his address, he’ll figure they’ll have someone there already. But he’ll think no one who’s not local will know about this place.” She took a deep breath. “I know Jimmy Haggen. He’ll be at the Sprawl.”

Mike nodded and exchanged a look with Hammond, who appeared to be operating at some sort of miraculous level of stress and irritation, visibly vibrating from it. The tall, skinny officer made a face, but nodded, pulling a sheaf of papers from inside her jacket. She unfolded them and turned them over, offering the blank side and a short, stubby pencil. “Can you draw a map? All the detail you can remember. Approximate scale—I don’t need a work of art, I need some idea of what the approaches are like, back and front, sides too, if you can.”

Candace nodded back, and the Colonel stepped out of the room to confer with her remaining unit.

He liked the officer, despite a distinct lack of warmth or humor. Hammond was competent, not cruel or petty, and after what they’d done in their attempt at escape, she appeared to hold no grudges. That more than anything else had brought home to him that this was real: The deaths of her people weren’t important enough to react to, in light of the real crisis.

He watched Candace working on the map for a moment. She was concentrating, and had actually stuck her tongue out like a kid in a cartoon. It struck him, because Julia used to do that. He could picture her now, clear as day, concentrating as she rolled a joint or cooked in an old bent spoon, her tongue sticking out from between her chapped lips. Julia had never worked harder than when she was getting high.

“Hey,” he said softly, looking at Myra, then at Candace. When she looked up, he leaned in closer. She smelled terrible, he thought, but then he was coated in sweat and dirt and dear and panic, too. “Haggen—do you think he can do anything with the … the whatever. The Black Box?”

She pursed her lips and looked down for a moment. Then she looked back at him. “I don’t know, honestly. I mean, this is some next-level shit, here. But what I saw on the screen looked like code—computer programming. Jimmy was always good at that stuff. Really good. Could have designed video games or worked for Microsoft or Apple, if he’d had any discipline.”

He glanced at Myra, who was pretending, he thought, not to hear them.

He considered. Something as godawful complex as this would require … simplification. A layer of abstraction, which was all computer programming languages were. A set of instructions that were slightly easier for humans to understand that would later be translated into machine code. Abstraction made working with computers easier. It made sense that there would be a similar layer of abstraction on this. The only question, then, was whether someone had based their abstraction, their instruction set, on existing programming languages. Whether what Haggen had in his hands right now would be familiar enough for him to figure out how to use it.

“He can’t use it,” Myra said, sounding tired. She was standing at the glass wall, arms wrapped around herself.

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “Because he doesn’t have access to the array. He can’t crunch the variables, the implications. He’d be flying blind, even if he can gin up instructions based on what he can read.”

Mike nodded. “You’re forgetting something. I’ll bet anything Haggen doesn’t care about running the numbers.”

Myra turned and stared at him. The idea that someone might not worry about details seemed to horrify her. One thing—maybe the only thing—he’d learned in his travels over the last year was that people tended to assume everyone else thought along the same lines that they did—at least if you looked like them. If you looked different, they assumed the opposite. But he wasn’t surprised that Myra would assume that they all respected science and causality and the virtue of diligence and thoroughness just because she did.

When Candace finished her crude map, she signaled to Hammond, who came back into the room with her people trailing behind her. She accepted it wordlessly and huddled with her people, studying it.

“All right,” Hammond snapped, looking up at Candace. “Can you get us to that back-trail? We don’t have time to cut all the way down to the dump here,” she jabbed a finger at the map, which Mike could see was impressively detailed and obviously drawn by someone who knew not just the terrain, but the basics of reading a map too. “Can you find it through the brush, straight-line?”

Candace thought about it. “Yes,” she said. “I can.”

Mike had figured as much. She knew the country as well as anyone else who’d grown up there, he thought. She could probably find her way in the dark, blind drunk, in a rainstorm in the same way he’d once been able to navigate the New York City Subway no matter his sobriety or physical condition.

“I’ve done just that plenty of times when heading home from a party at The Sprawl,” she said, grinning at Mike. “So all I have to do is reverse the polarity or something.”

Hammond nodded and turned to the remnants of her unit, running her cold eyes over them. “Rowland, you’ve got babysitter duty. Sit here with Ms. Azarov in case anyone wanders in somehow. You’re authorized to use force on anyone, including Mr. Haggen if he suddenly decides he does want to use the array to vet something. Azarov, get started on the new model. The sooner we know where we stand in terms of causality and the success or failure of this mission, the better.”

Rowland, his black face shiny from sweat, nodded curtly. After a moment Myra, who seemed lost in thought, looked up and nodded crisply. “I’ll start loading in the new data and get the algorithms humming,” she said.

Hammond nodded and glanced at her watch. “Rowland, in two hours, if we’re not back, you follow General Order One, clear?”

Mike considered the words General Order One and thought it sounded ominous. “What about him, Colonel?”

They all followed his gaze through the glass to where Glen Eastman sat on the floor. He looked glum and unhappy. Mike decided he had a right to be. From Glen’s perspective he’d done nothing wrong.

“Secure him,” she said to Rowland after a moment’s thought. “He’s under your discretion, soldier.”

Rowland nodded crisply. Mike tried to get a sense of how the man would react to Glen, of just how much danger Eastman might be in, but the soldier was blank-faced and not easy to read.

“Come on, then,” Hammond said. “Let’s go stop James Haggen from destroying the fucking universe.”

####

The walk reminded him of the night Julia had left him out in the Meadowlands. They’d been driving—shouldn’t have been driving, considering how stoned both of them were—and they’d gotten into an argument. One of those arguments no one had when sober, the kind of argument you only had when you were so fucked up nothing made sense. She’d pulled over and told him to get out of the fucking car, and he’d been stupid-angry enough to do just that. And she’d peeled off and was gone down the highway before he could think, before he realized he’d left his wallet and phone in the car.

So, he’d walked. It had been a humid, windy night in New Jersey. He couldn’t remember why he’d been in New Jersey—he couldn’t remember much—but he remembered the way the wind blew like it was part of some epic storm, but there was no relief. It wasn’t a cool wind. It was just as heavy and wet as the air around him. He’d started walking, sweating and unsteady. A car would occasionally speed past him, but it never occurred to him to try and flag one down. He felt too sorry for himself, and if he was being honest he remembered kind of enjoying the quiet and the vastness of the wetlands and the solitude.

He also remembered wishing Julia would have an accident and die. He remembered imagining the flames, and while he’d told himself it was the drugs and his screwed-up mindset, he—

He stumbled a little, his thoughts catching on something. After a moment he hurried up to where Candace was, her attention on the woods around them.

“Hey,” he whispered, matching her stride.

“We’re close,” she said. “Should be right up here, the trail, and then just a few hundred feet to the cabin.”

He nodded. “Listen, something you said—something about Haggen and his house. You said Jimmy’s all about surviving, these days, something about supplies.”

She nodded. “Jimmy got weird. I mean, he didn’t have much going on. Shitty jobs, he was getting paunchy, drinking too much. He was getting paranoid, kept talking about how he couldn’t catch a break. It was all the government—this was after he got nailed on tax problems, had to cough up a couple grand in fines. Always said that was why he couldn’t get ahead. He started to blame the government for a lot of other stuff, after that. Started stocking up on guns, canned food.”

“Survivalist, kind of,” Mike said. She nodded.

“Sort of. Kind of like a lazy survivalist, you know? Had all the talk and a lot of guns, but still showed up at Mad One Jack’s every night and twice on Saturdays.”

“You think he had security on the house? Like, crazy survivalist security?”

He’d spent two weeks in the Utah desert, to learn about survival living—growing food, building shelters, weapons and other gear. He wanted to see what people did when they went off-grid. At the time, at the height of his wandering, this had seemed like essential knowledge—if the Zombie Apocalypse came, he would have skills.

He’d been put in touch with a man named Todd, and he remembered being driven out into the middle of nowhere, up a trail, and to a hidden drive that led to a massive metal gate where two men carrying AR-15s had patted him down, searched his bags, made a few jokes, and passed them through. The place was an old ranch, running on well water and solar power, and housing about thirty men and women and their kids. Everyone armed, everyone genial and friendly (mainly, he discovered later, because he was white), everyone happy to teach him about the world as if he was a child who’s suddenly realized there was no Santa Claus.

And he remembered the booby-traps.

The fact that the Federal Government would send in troops at some point to take them down and destroy what they were building was a matter of faith at the ranch. It wasn’t a question of if, but rather when the jackboots hit the ground and the FBI or the ATF or black helicopters and wetwork agents stormed the place. The fact that there would be no attempt at arrests or negotiations was accepted as well: The government would come for them and it would gin up an excuse to execute everyone—this was what had happened at Waco, at Ruby Ridge. Those people hadn’t died because of their own illegality and recalcitrance. They’d been executed.

So, steps had been taken. The whole place was a minefield of traps: IEDs in the road, electrified fencing linked to batteries buried in the sandy soil, explosives wired into every building. Nothing was too primitive: The window sills all had broken glass and ragged pieces of tin glued to them, to cut hands hoisting invaders inside, and the floors under the windows always had nails driven upwards from below to catch those jackboots as they slipped inside. Mike remembered wondering how in the world the whole population of the ranch didn’t wind up with Lockjaw.

“Probably,” Candace said. “Yeah, sure, he mentioned a few ?measures’ he’d taken. Some of it sounded kind of crazy, to be honest. Like, I always wondered how he didn’t kill himself when he came home from Jacks’ drunk as hell, in the dark.”

Mike nodded. “You think he might be able to set some traps at The Sprawl?”

She stopped, hesitating in the darkness. “That’s—”

There was an explosion up ahead, the night suddenly lit up orange and red, the noise shaking the ground under their feet, making them both stagger and struggle for balance. In the instant silence that followed, there was a soft rain of dirt and debris.

Candace looked at him and grimaced. “Shit.”

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