But which comes first? I wondered. Was the third floor the past or the future? Was it an abandoned, desolate space waiting for reclamation, waiting to be filled and rejuvenated? Or was it what comes next, what happens when all of these people pack up and leave, abandoning this place for good?
“This is the military command center,” Taylor explained, noticing the perplexed look on my face. “You’ll find the bigwigs up on the top two floors, plotting and planning, arranging the infrastructure, sending out search parties and data-gathering expeditions.” She gestured into one of the rooms. “Down here, you’ve got the dregs, crunching numbers and cataloging information, trying to make sense of what’s going on.”
We continued down the main corridor, past several more densely packed rooms. Finally, Taylor turned into a smaller office. There were only four cubicles here, all of them oversized and filled with multiple monitors. At the moment, the room held only a single occupant: a soldier dressed in a natty olive-drab uniform. He glanced up from his computer as soon as he heard us enter, and a wide smile spread across his face.
“Taylor!” the soldier exclaimed. He rose to his feet and greeted her with a warm embrace. I caught the grin on Taylor’s lips and felt a moment of intense jealousy; it was an irrational reaction, I knew, but it was something I couldn’t control. She was practically beaming. I hadn’t known her for long, but still, from all I’d seen, I wanted to be able to elicit that type of reaction in her, the sheer magnitude of that joy.
As soon as he let go, Taylor introduced us. “Danny, this is Dean. He’s a photographer. He’s trying to document the situation here.” The soldier’s arm remained draped around Taylor’s shoulder, and she reached up to pat his hand as she talked. “Danny’s my spy in the military-industrial complex. He helped me get in good with the soldiers.”
“You make it sound like treason,” Danny said. He held out his hand and I shook it. He was taller than me—about six foot two—and he had a powerful frame. His dark brown hair was sheared close to his skull, letting a glimpse of skin shine through. It made the curve of his head look like a powerful, tightly flexed muscle. He had a strong handshake. “I just help her out now and then. I figure I should do my part… lend a hand to the little guy.”
Danny smiled. He had a perfect smile—a warm, winning smile—and that bugged me to no end. “A photographer, huh,” he said, and he gave his head a tiny little shake. “You should be careful out there. The captain sees the press as public enemy number one, and he’s already got a couple of newsmen locked away at Fort Lewis… Frankly, I think he just doesn’t know what else to do.”
I nodded, remembering the Jeep with the P.P. plates on the outskirts of the city. Maybe I wasn’t falling behind. Maybe there weren’t any competing photographers in the city. Not anymore, at least. But the threat of prison—not even prison, I realized, but military detainment as some type of enemy combatant—made me feel downright nauseated. No guts, no glory, I told myself, but the feeling refused to go away.
I took a deep breath and watched as Taylor handed Danny Charlie’s USB drive. He sat back down at his computer and plugged it in, double clicking an icon as soon as it appeared on the screen. After a couple of seconds, Danny removed the drive and handed it back to Taylor.
“What was that?” I asked. “What did you just do?”
“Charlie’s program,” Taylor explained. “We load up all of our email, Danny plugs it into the military network, and it launches a burst of encrypted data out into the real world.” She smiled at the phrase. “Charlie’s got a server on the outside—decrypts all of that information and forwards it on. It also downloads all of our incoming mail, along with the latest news from a bunch of sites.” She held up the tiny drive. “It’s all in here, ready for us to start surfing at our leisure. We do it every couple of days. We’ll get you hooked up next time around.”
“And the military doesn’t know? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Nah,” Danny said, dismissing the concern with a wave of his hand. “Charlie’s got it streamlined down to a couple of hundred packets. As long as we aren’t sending out high-definition video, it’s barely noticeable. Besides, I know guys who surf hard-core porn from their military terminals. Next to some of the nasty shit I’ve seen on their screens, this is tulips and butterflies.”
“He also recharges for us.” Taylor pointed to a power strip beneath the soldier’s desk. “I’m sure he’d do your camera for you.”
I nodded. The thought of throwing my battery charger up through a third-story window didn’t exactly fill me with joy—when I was a kid, I never played Little League, and my throwing arm was for shit—but it was nice to know I had the option.
“And now that we’ve got business out of the way…” Taylor took a step back, leaving me hanging over Danny’s shoulder, transforming the two of us into unintentional conspirators. “Why don’t you tell Dean about what you’re doing here? Catch us up on all of that great government progress.”
Danny gave Taylor a scowl, then turned back to his computer. He popped open a window and started scouring through directories, looking for something. “What do you know, Dean? About the phenomenon?”
“I’ve been following it on some underground message boards, and there’s been some stuff that hasn’t made it into the mainstream press. Some strange pictures. Some video. Vague, translucent figures, weird physics. Kids in a cell-phone video, bouncing a ball through a—” I paused, trying to think how best to describe it. “—a sticky space in the air, where the ball just slows down, then speeds up again, finally stopping and hovering in midair. Everybody knows something’s going on here—there’s no denying the quarantine or the government’s refusal to talk—but nobody knows exactly what. Some type of terrorist attack, maybe. A chemical leak. A haunting.” I smiled at this last suggestion. “Maybe something to do with an ancient Indian burial ground?”
Danny didn’t smile. “Yeah, we’ve got a lot of scientists trying to figure it all out. Here, on this floor, we’re just gathering information. We catalog incident reports—from civilians, from our soldiers on patrol—and look for patterns.” He lifted a clipboard from the clutter on his desk. It held a photocopied sheet titled REPORT OF UNEXPLAINED INCIDENT. This particular sheet had been filled out in red ink.
Before he set it back down, I managed to read a few of the neatly typed questions:
13) What were your thoughts before, during, and after the incident? (Please be as specific as possible.)
14) What emotions did the incident evoke? (Fear? Amusement? Regret?)
15) Do you feel compelled to seek out similar experiences?
The person who had filled out this particular form had drawn a shaky red line through question 15, as if he or she were trying to strike it from existence—the question or the compulsion it described, I didn’t know.
“And what have you found?” I asked.
“A lot of stuff.” Danny shrugged. “And nothing.” He pointed to a white dry-erase board tacked to the opposite wall. There was a list of six bullet-pointed items sketched out in bold black letters. “We’ve narrowed the phenomena down to six basic categories. First, you’ve got your visitors—people and things appearing where they shouldn’t be, where they can’t be. Celebrities driving through town in BMWs. Dead politicians. We’ve even got a cluster of random people who swear they saw the Empire State Building rising out of the west end of Riverfront Park, but I’m guessing that one’s just complete bullshit. On the flip side of that, you’ve got our second item: disappearances. People and things that should be here but aren’t. Things that just… cease to exist. There’s a whole block in the industrial district out east—it used to be warehouses, with streets and trucks and loading docks. It’s all gone now. Nothing but flat, bare earth. And you know the mayor, right? You’ve seen the video?”