John said, “Do you have one where Tupac is still alive?”
Amy said, “Give us a moment to say good-bye.”
And time to think, I thought.
Tasker said, “Again, what’s the point of a good-bye that won’t be remembered?”
Amy said, “What’s the point of all this explanation, if it won’t be remembered? Why didn’t you just shoot us with your brain rays right off the bat?”
“Isn’t it obvious? This alleged invisible hand that protects you, I wanted to know that it wouldn’t reach out to stop us at the moment of decision. It didn’t. Now, I have a busy night ahead, so…”
Tasker nodded to the nearest cloak—his sagging face had a gray rubber mustache—and he pointed a thing at me that looked like a robotic elephant’s detachable dick.
I recoiled. Amy threw herself in front of me and John said, “WAIT!”
There was a pop, sounding like a gunshot echoing in the distance. I didn’t feel any different. Then the cloak with the elephant dick gun slumped to his knees, black blood running freely from what was supposed to be his forehead. As he went down, he fired his weapon wildly, an impossibly bright blue light blasting forth and hitting Agent Gibson right in his face.
Gibson got this weird look in his eyes. He blinked and took in what surrounded him, seeing first the three of us, who looked harmless enough, and then the circle of ominous black cloaks with their alien arsenal. One of them stepped forward and raised its weapon at us, looking to finish the project begun by his colleague.
Gibson’s eyes went wide and instinct took over. He pulled a gun from a shoulder holster and in one reflexive motion put the cloaked thing down with a headshot.
Tasker screamed, “DROP IT!” and drew her own weapon on her rogue partner. But Agent Gibson, frantic over his inability to remember who the hell he was, had shifted into fight-or-flight mode. He spun, saw the gun pointed at him, and shot his fellow agent in the chest.
Eyeballs swollen with panic, he turned and ran, firing in front of him to clear a path through the cloaks. John, Amy, and I followed. I was about to yell for somebody to steal one of the NON trucks, but the moment we ran off the parking lot and hit the road, Gibson turned and saw the three of us in tow. Interpreting this as pursuit, he raised the gun toward me and pulled the trigger—
The man was blasted out of view by a Range Rover. It skidded to a stop in front of us, Chastity Payton at the wheel.
“Y’ALL GET THE FUCK IN HERE!”
We crammed ourselves into the back seat and she sped off into the night. There was a hunting rifle with a scope propped up on the front seat next to her.
Chastity craned her head around and said, “They following us?”
I said, “I don’t see headlights, but I don’t think they use them. You killed both of those dudes?”
“May they find peace in the next world, but their own choices took ’em there. If your people dress like that, you’re on the wrong side.”
Amy said, “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. The four of us, we’re gonna have a talk. And I’ll tell you right now, I’m just about sick of this shit.”
John said, “They’re coming!”
There was a black truck behind us, no headlights, coming fast. Chastity hunched forward and stepped on the gas. She had a determined look in her eyes that kind of scared me—a “They’ll never take me alive” look.
We soon found our lane obstructed by a slow semi, barely managing the speed limit. Chastity swung to the left to pass and immediately was almost obliterated by an oncoming car that honked angrily as it flew by. The NON vehicle was growing in the rearview mirror.
We reached an overpass, and Chastity swung out to the left lane and once again found oncoming headlights—another semi. This time she didn’t go back, she floored it, attempting to thread the needle. Everyone screamed.
She cleared the truck on the right and yanked the wheel over a split second before the honking juggernaut went whooshing past. I swore I heard it scrape paint off the side mirror.
The NON truck behind us had tried to follow.
It smashed directly into the eighteen-wheeler we’d just avoided.
Through the rear window I saw chaos, the truck’s trailer jackknifing and rolling across the overpass, cargo spraying down onto the roadway below.
John said, “Jesus.”
“You see,” said Chastity, “that’s why you want the Range Rover. Jeep would have tipped over doing that shit. Always got to be prepared, that’s what I say.”
12. DIOGEE WASN’T A GOOD DOG
Chastity took a winding, random path back toward town, but we never saw any additional pursuit. I half-expected NON to roust a helicopter to track us beyond the blocked roadway, but we apparently didn’t rate that kind of response, not yet.
We pulled over at a truck stop, parking in a spot where a row of trailers would hide us from the road. Chastity shifted into park, pulled out a revolver, and turned around in her seat so she could point it right at my face. I had lost count of how many guns had been pointed at me in the last hour. Was it five?
She said, “Tell me exactly what is going on here. Don’t bullshit me, don’t sugarcoat it. Tell me the whole truth. Right now. Because I’m tellin’ you, I am on my last nerve here.”
I said, “Are you going to believe me, if I do? Otherwise we’re just wasting each other’s time.”
“I like to think I know the truth when I hear it.”
“Good. I had never seen your son before they found him in my apartment.”
“I believe you.”
“You do? Well, that’s good, then. Someone stuck him in there, to frame us.”
“No, that ain’t right, neither.”
“Okay. Well, why don’t you tell me what—”
“There’s somethin’ wrong with him. With Mikey. He isn’t right. None of this is right.”
John said, “On that, we agree.”
Amy asked, “Is he talking? Your son?”
“Oh, he talks.”
“What does he say happened, that night? Does he remember?”
“Says your man here woke him up, standing in his bedroom. Says David snapped his fingers and suddenly they were someplace else, some kind of fucked-up Disneyland.”
I said, “Joy Park?”
“How’d you know?”
“It came up in the Maggie Knoll case. It’s not a real park.”
“No shit it’s not a real park. Mikey says when you walk in the front gate, everybody gets a pair of wings, lets everybody fly around from ride to ride. Try to look up Joy Park on the web, all you find are the biggest titties I’ve ever seen on an Asian girl. Then said you told him the last ‘ride’ would involve him living in the belly of a monster.”
I said, “So, what do you want from us? And before you ask me to tell you what’s going on, I’ll just stop you there, because we don’t have any fucking idea.”
“I want you to see him. My boy. To talk to him. I need someone else to understand, because I feel like my mind is splitting in half.”
I said, “Fine, let us talk to him.”
“Mikey won’t talk to you. He thinks you’re the one who snatched him.”
Amy said, “What about me? He doesn’t have any reason to be scared of me, does he? What is it you want us to find out?”
“I want you to find out if he’s still my son.”
I thought, Oh.
John said, “You think he’s been … replaced? By a lookalike?”
She said, “The fact that you jumped right to that conclusion tells me you already know this is a possibility. Talk to him. You’ll see.”
I scratched my chin and watched the rain for a moment. If the child she had gotten back was in fact just a swarm of fuckroaches, then the implications were almost too much for me to grasp. The question of where the real Mikey was being held was just the first in a series of questions I’d need a spreadsheet to sort through.