I was on a bit of a downer, in other words.
Vinaldi joined me after ten minutes. He wasn’t even breathing heavily, although the front of his suit was splattered with blood.
“Yhandim’s in The Gap,” he said, with a small, brutal smile.
It was obvious, and maybe I had already known. Where better to hide than somewhere no one else can enter? Perhaps that’s why I’d spent the last twenty-four hours in decreasing circles of futility, running away from the problem.
“Then we wait till he comes out,” I said.
“Come on, Randall. You know we can’t do that. He’s got your girl in there, and the other woman. That’s no place for them. It’s no place for anyone.”
“Johnny, The Gap’s been closed since the last sidelift. That’s twenty fucking years. How the hell are we supposed to get back in there? It’s impossible.”
“Clearly it isn’t, or our lunatic friends wouldn’t be able to come and go as they please. And Maxen must have found a way, didn’t he? Howie in there came up with a plan. For once it’s a good one—so much so that he may have earned himself a higher place in my organization at some later date. We let that guy inside free, let him think we’re finished with him, and then we see where he goes. He’s fucked up pretty badly now. If you’re right, then he’s going to need to get back there real soon.”
“It won’t work.”
“It might.”
“No, it won’t.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Vinaldi shouted, his face suddenly inches from mine. “You got any better ideas?”
“I can’t go back in there,” I said. “I’m not going back in The Gap.”
“You’re scared, I’m scared,” he spat. “Anybody’d be fucking scared. But it’s the only answer, Randall. Either we go in there and fuck these guys up or they’re going to fuck up those two women and all the others you keep talking about. More important than that, far as I’m concerned, and I’m a selfish man and happy that way, when they’re finished with them they’re going to come after me. I worked twenty years to get where I am today, and I’m not losing it because some guys who should have been dead decades ago blame me for the fact they couldn’t keep track of where the fuck they were and follow the rest of us out of a firestorm which I didn’t lead them into in the first place.”
I turned away from him, but he carried on ranting.
“I could just wait until they come out, but you can’t. You got to go in there and find them. I’m offering to help you, Randall, but the offer ain’t going to last forever. Understand?”
“I can’t go back,” I said, and walked away.
People are always finding me when I don’t want to be found. When Vinaldi appeared in the doorway I was sitting on Mal’s floor, surrounded by used foil, unused packets and a needle. Half of the last of my money was already in my bloodstream, the rest was ready and waiting. In my own mind I was sitting in Mal’s because Yhandim knew where it was and might come looking for me there; in reality, I was there because I had nowhere else to go.
I’d gone straight up to my contact on 24. He didn’t seem surprised to see me again, or that this time I wanted Rapt that had been less cut. I gave him everything I had, and he passed it over. I shot up in the back of his store.
By the time I got back down to 8 it had kicked in. Climbing into the chute at the back of the women’s rest room was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. But the last, dying tendrils of my working mind told me that if Maxen was tied so heavily into the NRPD, I couldn’t afford to leave by a normal route, so I soldiered on with it anyway.
More by luck than judgment I found my way to the main shaft, and laboriously clambered down. I don’t know if you’ve ever descended eight floors, hand over hand on a ladder, while full of designer hallucinogenic amphetamorphines, but it takes a certain degree of doggedness. It was very dark, for a start, the shadows brown and continually slithering over my hands and face. They were like snakes in that they were drier than they appeared, but unlike snakes in that they whispered bad things to me, which reptiles rarely do. I slipped once on the way down, and because of my condition believed that I was falling upward. This, I thought, was fine, and I was mildly interested to see where I might end up. Perhaps I’d fall as high as the 200’s, in which case I’d give old Arlond Maxen a piece of my mind.
Him and his brother both, I muttered, the fucken dead fucken fuck.
Luckily—I guess—my back brain realized I was unlikely to have conquered gravity anywhere except inside my head, and my hands grabbed a lower stair entirely independently of my will. I failed to dislocate my wrist by the barest of margins, and made it down most of the remaining steps, only falling about the last six feet. I landed heavily on my back, and checked out for a while.
When I came to everything was worse. But I stood up laboriously, deciding I ought to go somewhere.
Then I got lost.
I’ve done the back route in and out of New Richmond more times than I can recall. A lot of it takes place in the dark, so you have to be pretty good at remembering the way. On this particular occasion, I wasn’t. I wasn’t even especially good at remembering how to use my legs. I tried shutting my eyes, but this merely put me into a spotless operating room, where a cake fashioned out of eye-splittingly bright yellow and white icing was waiting for an operation. This scene remained for a number of minutes after I opened my eyes, before finally fading into the darkness. I resolved to keep my eyes open for the time being. I seemed to have been walking for an awfully long time without reaching the landmarks I was expecting, but on the other hand each time a droplet of sweat squeezed out of the pores on my forehead it seemed to take about an hour and I was worried about being drowned, so it’s possible my judgment may have been impaired.
Then I was very, very frightened of something. I wasn’t sure what, and the fear only lasted a few minutes. Or half an hour.
When that passed, I entered a brief spell of relative lucidity, which is generally the prelude to the second—and more momentous—Rapt rush. I took the opportunity to accept that I was completely and utterly lost, and in a part of the MegaMall’s lowest level I didn’t know. I shouldn’t have gone down right to the bottom of the main chute, but got off one level above as I always had before. I was somewhere near the heart of the engine block, and had no clear way of finding my way out. The corridor was circular, and reinforced with very thick ceramic panels. It could only be the main exhaust duct.
Something which I took at first to be a series of pink flowers exploding at a distance then revealed itself, in time, and with a few cautious steps forward, this turned out to be not a visual phenomenon at all, but a sound. A quiet, pistony sound. I crept toward it, giggling, reasoning that whatever it was it couldn’t be more frightening than what was going on in my head.
“What the hell are you doing here?” said a voice.
I’d been wrong, of course; there was something more frightening, and being addressed out of darkness in a place no living human even knew about certainly fitted the bill. I shrieked in a very uncool manner and tried to run away, but my legs had apparently turned into columns of rice, loosely packed together. They gave out dryly and deposited me on the floor, and I just waited for whatever was going to happen, while fighting off flying nuns which even I could tell weren’t really there.