In another time something came and got him.
"Get up, Sam," Fez said urgently. She tried to focus on him, but he was shaking her too hard.
"What? What is it?" she said, forcing her eyes open. It seemed as if she'd gone back to bed only a few minutes before.
"There's bad news, and there's worse news. Something's happened. L.A.'s gone."
"It was right where we left it," she mumbled sleepily, and then it registered on her. "Wait a minute." She pulled away from him, blinking. "What else?"
"I think we lost Art with it."
29
The security guard who had replaced the receptionist at the desk in the corporate lobby told him he shouldn't bother; there were no elevators working, and the building was emptying out. "Unless you really want to walk up sixteen flights," the guard added. "Probably meet the next wave coming down, and they'll sweep you all the way to the bottom again anyway."
"I'll take my chances," Gabe said, and sneaked a look at the monitors in the desk. They were all dark.
"Surveillance is down. Can't get anything but some kinda weird snow," said the guard, holding up a walkie-talkie. "Forward into the past."
"Probably." Gabe headed down the hall, fingering the key to the freight elevator in his pocket. More than likely it was in use by others like himself who had acquired a key and failed to return it, but at least it wasn't on-line.
Contrary to what the guard had said, he met no one going the other way down the hall or coming out of the stairwell, so he was able to slip off to the freight area unobserved. But it gave him a bad feeling anyway.
– -
The double doors to the Common Room resisted his push and then gave like a broken mechanism. Gabe hesitated, hoping no one was there, and then spotted LeBlanc. She was sitting at the same table where he'd sat the day she had come in to tell him Gina had been about to jump off the roof, in the same way, with her back to the rest of the room, watching the screens in the wall. Except now there was nothing on the screens but the strange pulsing shadows.
Gabe had another brief flash of the lake and the stony shore before he managed to block out the sight of the monitors. "LeBlanc?" he called, approaching her slowly. "Bonnie, are you all right?"
He moved around in front of her, keeping his back to the wall. The expression on LeBlanc's round face was one he had always associated with victims of especially grisly accidents who found themselves staring at the empty place where an arm or a leg had been. Her eyes had something wrong with them; it was as though they were no longer actually working in tandem, yet they moved together when she finally focused on him.
"It would be you," she said. Her voice was thick with effort. She shuddered a little, blinked, and seemed to refocus. "Ah, God, Gabe, you're in it, too, aren't you? Or it's in you, I should say.
His acute awareness of the pulsing shadows on the screens behind him intensified, becoming almost painful. "I guess maybe it is, Bonnie."
"Change for the machines." She sighed heavily. "That's all we've ever done is change for the machines. But this is the last time. We've finally changed enough that the machines will be making all the changes from now on."
He took her hands and tried to pull her to her feet. "We'll go down to Medical-"
"Forget it." She pulled away from him. "Medical was one of the first places it went, it's all changed there, too." With both hands, she felt her head all over, as if it were made of eggshell. "The only place to go now is into the context. If you can find it. Between the context and the content, between the mainline and the hardline, falls the shadow. Isn't that how it reads?" LeBlanc made a face. "If it doesn't, it should. I don't have much longer. The shadow will fall, and I'll fall with it. That was what it all meant, you know, why Valjean took Dinshaw to the terrace. Because of the fall. He fell with her. Gina." She laughed a little, but her eyes were pleading. " 'If you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it or throw it away.' I hope you can dance, Gabe, and if you can, I hope you can dance fast enough, because- here it comes-"
She looked startled for a moment. Then her body gave a violent jerk, and she fell off the chair.
"Bonnie?" Gabe crouched beside her and raised her head. Her eyes stared blindly, her right pupil a pinpoint and her left a gaping cavern. A pulse beat twice in her temple and stilled.
Nausea sent the world sideways. Gabe sat down heavily, clutching his head with one hand. The sockets-
His thoughts raced, blurred, quick-focused, and blurred again. He squeezed his eyes shut and waited for it to happen, whatever it was. Maybe it would come like a swift kick in the head, or maybe a pickax, or a hot punch in the face…
Suddenly he had a startlingly clear image of the lake; he was looking across it to where someone was standing on the stony shore, just starting to turn around to face him. A sharp thrill of fear ran him through, and then he found himself blinking at the silent Common Room. He had almost seen who it was on the shore; almost. The image had vanished too quickly.
LeBlanc hadn't moved. "Bonnie?" he said again. The Common Room seem to swallow up his voice. He pushed himself upright and stumped over to the emergency panel near (change for) the machines.
"Security," he said, hitting the panel with the side of his fist. "Medical, anybody-there's a woman up here who's hurt-" He looked over his shoulder at LeBlanc, caught a glimpse of the screens, and looked away quickly, in spite of the fact that they were pulling at his vision with a force that was all but physical. "Hurt or dead. Can someone come up here?"
There was a burst of static from the speaker above the panel, and he thought he could hear a faint voice under it.
"Security or Medical," he said, louder, hitting the panel again. This time the static lasted only a second or two before the speaker went dead.
Gabe looked up, as if he might somehow acquire X-ray vision to see through the building to the upper floors, to sixteen, where his pit was, and LeBlanc's, and Gina's, and Mark's. He touched his forehead; the skin felt no different. That's funny, I can't feel a bomb in there.
Something made him look over at LeBlanc again. There was a dark spot growing on the carpet next to her head. Blood was running out of her ears.
He flung himself through the double doors and ran to the freight elevator.
The hall was as silent as the Common Room had been, all of the doors closed. Gabe frowned. They should have been open; the locks were set to release whenever there was even a minor glitch in the building's programs. Fail-safe, to prevent them from being trapped in their pits during a catastrophe.
He went from door to door, trying each one, buzzing for entry, getting no response, not even an indication of whether they were occupied or not. Let them all have gone, he thought, let them all have left the way LeBlanc tried to.
At the end of the hallway, he found Mark's door partly open, and he made himself go in.
It's too hard, Gabe thought, looking down at Mark's body. If he'd stayed in the media bar, he wouldn't have had to see any of this, or listen to the kid talking and talking under the flickering lights. Whoever the kid was; eighteen, maybe nineteen years old, too young to be a doctor. Maybe he was one of Gina's weird rock stars, except he didn't seem quite weird enough. Comparatively speaking, anyway.
The kid reached over and shook his arm. "I said, what's going on out there?"
Gabe looked at him blankly.
"I could only raise the dataline in spots before he, ah, went," the kid said. "Now it's gone altogether."