Those That Wake

THE LIBRARIAN

“I THOUGHT NO ONE KNEW where the Librarian was,” Mal said.

“No one knows where he is,” Remak responded, looking through the windshield and scanning the large house and sprawling lawn cut by the long shadows of twilight. “But there are educated theories. The one I favor was corroborated by another agent, who claimed to have traced the route of certain electronic files transmitted to the Librarian.”

“Traced them to here,” Laura said, her eyes gazing somewhat mournfully over the still and tranquil expanse, not altogether dissimilar to her own town.

“For isolation, it’s rather an ideal choice,” Remak said.

Laura could hardly argue that. Given the condition of the GPS, they’d had to stop at a gas station to find a paper map. Laura had been flabbergasted to discover that such quaintly antiquated things still existed, and she’d had a crash course in how to navigate by them, as Mike was categorically useless, gazing out the window dimly as though the world were diminishing while he watched. It had taken them long enough to find the minuscule town of Pope Springs, Remak’s first landmark, and then another hour to track this house down based on his complicated triangulation methods.

“So…” Mal hesitated, and silence filled the space. “Do we just knock on the door?”

“Yes,” Laura said resolutely.

“Absolutely not,” Remak said at the same time.

They looked at each other, and something crossed Remak’s usually placid face. Was he impressed that she was stepping up, or irritated?

“I’m going to reconnoiter,” he said. “You wait here.”

“Listen.” Laura put her hand on Remak’s arm, and Mal felt an unexpected pang of jealousy. “You need him to trust us, right? Suppose you snoop around and he catches you. How’s that going to look to him?”

Remak looked back up at the house, a gothic construction of wood with curtains drawn over all the windows. It presented a distinctly unwelcoming picture.

“Yes,” he said, at the very least always able to see good sense. “You’re right.” He held his eyes on the house a moment longer and opened his door even as Laura opened hers.

He stopped. “What are you doing?” he asked her.

She looked at him and back at Mal and Mike, neither of whom had moved to exit the car.

“Uh,” she said, “going with you.”

“Laura”—he looked at her sharply—”this man is a recluse and probably for very good reason. He’s not going to—”

“What’s less threatening,” Laura countered, “a scary stranger by himself or a dude with an innocent-looking young girl?”

Remak removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“All right,” he said quietly. “Let’s go.”

“All of us,” Mal said from the back.

Remak froze at the door again, his chin falling to his chest and his eyes closed.

“She’s not going into that messed-up-looking place without me,” Mal said.

Remak was uncharacteristically speechless. He looked at the two of them: Mal’s flat resolution, the tiny smile crawling up the corners of Laura’s lips.

He shook his head in resignation and finally got out of the car.

“Mike,” Laura said. “Mike! Let’s go.”

Mike snapped to attention and looked around as if for the first time, then slowly departed the car with the rest of them.

They crossed the gravel road from the place beneath a shaggy tree where the car was nominally obscured. They trailed the curving dirt driveway up to the house, their shadows casting weirdly elongated monsters across the grass of the lawn.

“Hang back,” Remak said to Mal and Mike as they neared the door. “Please.”

Remak and Laura went up a short flight of four stone steps and stood before a large wooden door with an antique knocker on it. Laura’s hand came up, but Remak’s hand shot out and got to it first, lifting and banging the heavy thing three times.

They waited in a chilly breeze, the sounds of the first crickets beginning to ring in the evening. Remak knocked again.

After a minute, they exchanged glances and Laura shrugged. What now?

“Sir,” Remak said to the door, “my name is Jon Remak. I … I’m associated with the cooperative. I’m here on a matter of some urgency.”

He looked around the doorframe, at the lintels of the roof, anywhere there might be a camera.

“Please,” Laura said to the door, knowing her tone was a beseeching one, knowing it always convinced her parents to tack an extra hour on to curfew. “We have nowhere else to go.”

No response.

“Maybe this is the wrong place,” Mal said from behind them.

“Please,” Laura said again, and now there was no mistaking the ache in her voice. “No one knows who we are. No one remembers us. We need your help.”

There was an anxious moment of silence, then a click.

Laura looked at Remak, whose attention was now riveted on the door. Feeling as though she’d earned the right, she pushed it.

There was a large if minimally appointed foyer. A table on one side and a large couch on the other flanked a flight of old wooden stairs traveling up to a dark balcony. Remak stepped in first, then the rest came. The door closed behind them, sealing off the outside world. The interior of the house was a set piece, furnished and well-ordered, but like an artifice, untouched and empty of more than just people.

“What are your names?” A voice reverberated through the room. It was so clear and vibrant that only electronic alteration could have achieved it.

“Remak. Jon Remak.”

“Laura Westlake.”

“Mal Jericho.”

“Mike,” he said when Laura nudged his shoulder. “Just Mike.”

“You’ve come here”—the electronic voice filled the room—”because you approached this cooperative and they turned you away?”

“No, sir, not precisely,” Remak said. “I’m a field analyst. Used to be a field analyst. I was … kidnapped, for lack of a better word, during an inquiry. When I escaped and returned to make my report, no one remembered me. I wasn’t even on their files, or so they claimed. I understand that’s hard to—”

“No,” said the voice. “Not at all, unfortunately. And you, Laura. Who forgot you?

“My parents.” Her voice was all but dead.

“I’m very sorry,” the voice said. “Jon, you and Laura may come up. You’ll forgive me, but I need to limit my exposure.”

“No,” Mal said, a gentle but heavy hand falling on Laura’s shoulder.

“This is our only opportunity, Mal.” Remak’s voice was low and harsh. “You’re going to have to trust me now.”

Unconvinced by Remak’s demand, Mal allowed his arm to fall to his side only when Laura touched his hand and nodded at him.

Remak and Laura turned toward the stairway.

“Up the stairs and through the door at the left,” the voice directed them.

Together, they climbed the stairs, and the door clicked as they came to it. They pushed it open and disappeared into shadow.

Mal watched and, at the last sight of them, scowled.

“This seems like a bad idea,” he said up to the shadows. He turned and looked at Mike. “What do you think’s going to happen up there?”

Mike looked at him without expression for a moment, then, taking a deep breath and setting his shoulders, he rejoined the world around him all at once.

“They’ll be tortured and killed. But don’t let it get you down, kid. We’re all gonna be dead inside a few days.”

Mal’s eyes burned into him.

“You’ve been a zombie since we left the city, and now you come out with that? What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Are you joking?” Mike said, with something of his old acid. “What’s wrong? Are you blind and deaf and retarded?”

“Do you see Laura shutting down? Remak?” Mal demanded hotly. “Are they any better off than you?”

“You’re goddamned right they are.” Mike nearly shouted it back at him, his voice reverberating up the empty walls. “Know why? Because they care. Yesterday, Remak puts me in a grocery store and tells me to wait while he checks with his people. When he comes back, he tells me that no one remembers us, that we’re somehow disconnected from our entire lives, anyone we ever knew and loved. So I make a few calls from a paycell and guess what? He’s right. And I’m thinking, ‘Holy shit, this is hell.’ But when I’m over the shock and I’m thinking it through, about what it means to me specifically, I realize: it doesn’t matter at all. I never met my old man; my mother has nothing but grief for me. My students, I don’t miss any of them. I haven’t got any friends worth a damn.” Mike leaned closer, nearly into Mal’s face, though his voice didn’t lower. “My whole f*cking life, it was so empty that when someone took it away from me, I don’t even miss it.

“Remak and Laura had their lives taken away, but they want them back. I had mine taken, and I don’t care. My mother was right all along: I don’t matter at all.”

His eyes burned into Mal from inches away, challenging him to find a solution to that.

And Mal couldn’t. Was his own life so different? He had essentially been alone, even before his father left him. So he glared back at Mike, never willing to be the first one to walk away.

Eventually, Mike’s eyes cooled and he walked away with a sneer. Mal watched his back as Mike stalked to a window, yanked the curtain away, and turned his gaze on the empty, darkening lawn outside.


Remak and Laura passed into a long hallway of rich, dark wood. There were two doors along one side and a single door on the other, and at the far end, across from them, another door. Laura looked up at Remak and they proceeded forward until, as they came to the single door, it clicked sharply in the murky silence.

Remak pushed it open.

“The doors here are heavy,” he whispered to her. “Reinforced with metal inside.”

Metal, indeed. They came into a room that was flat gray metal from the floor to the walls, whose corners were vague with shadows and crawled upward into darkness. In the middle of the room was a single gunmetal table, spotlighted with a pale yellow glow.

“There are chairs against the left wall,” the electronic voice said from out of the dim reaches. Remak found two, made of a harsh metal that matched the table, and pulled them up. He gestured for Laura to sit and then did so himself.

Unprompted, Remak began speaking to the anonymous space around them, recounting their last few days. It was not particularly cold in here, but Laura felt herself beginning to shiver, a cold sweat pricking the nape of her neck.

When he finished, the room returned only a silence that seemed to vibrate from the shrouded corners. When the disembodied response finally came, it was like being haunted by a phantom.

“There are two kinds of evolution,” said the voice from the depths. “There is Darwin’s evolution, the mutation and adaptation of genes. This is a physiological process, occurring when an animal, a gene-carrier, interacts with environment. This change, of course, occurs over thousands of years.”

The voice was coming from somewhere in front of them, but with the majority of the room cloaked in black, the Librarian might have been in the same room, hidden in the darkness, or somewhere else through the unknown halls of the house.

“And then there is cultural evolution.” The voice vibrated out of the black. “The process by which our minds, rather than our bodies, adapt as they interact with environment. It is what our minds soak up from the world around us, from other people, from what we see, what we are told. Now, it takes millions of years for a flipper to become a leg. But our minds, our perspective, in a sense the very nature of who we are, can change in an instant, in the amount of time it takes to hear and process a word or interpret an image. Do you understand? Just as the dangers of our environment—persistent attacks by a predator species, eating a poisonous plant—will evolve us over a millennium, ideas will evolve us, too, over the course of months or minutes or seconds.”

Remak nodded. To Laura, this sounded similar to the rudiments of the Global Dynamic as she understood it.

“Darwinian evolution is genetics,” the Librarian’s voice went on. “The units of transmission are genes. They move in the physical universe, the strongest ones surviving, passed from generation to generation. What, then, is the transmission unit of cultural evolution?

“In 1976, a biologist named Dawkins at Oxford University gave these units a name. He called them memes. They are conceptually alive, just as genes are. Like genes, memes are born in one person and are capable of implanting themselves in other people. Unlike genes, however, they move over physical space, but not in the physical universe. Memes are living ideas, moving from brain to brain in the space of a glance or a synaptic impulse, the most contagious life form ever to exist. These memes, these living ideas, are the carriers of human culture.”

If the Librarian was watching them, there was nothing to see but the faces of two people turned to stone.

“Once upon a time, memes were revelations,” the Librarian told them. “The invention of the wheel, or Einstein’s theory of relativity. Religion—possibly even God Himself—is a meme. And other, more basic things: an unforgettable quote, a way of playing a game or making a clay pot. When human beings had less access to one another, culture grew more slowly, and the memes were simpler, more significant ideas.

“Not so, anymore. Now memes are catch phrases from movies, tunes you can’t get out of your head, a cereal commercial jingle, an empty political slogan, a garish fashion. The birth and transmission of these living ideas is no longer a natural process, an inherent by-product of human life. Now corporations produce them in limitless quantity, flooding the entire world with them, suffocating the meaningful memes, the important ones, the ones that nourish life and thought because they’ve had generations to grow and flourish organically in our minds. Corporations manufacture hollow ideas, or deformed ones, and they’re winning the battle through sheer numbers.

“Of course, the capability to do this is fairly recent. The Internet is the greatest propagator of memes in the history of human thought by a factor of millions. Writing was crucial, radio a vast step forward, television a powerful leap beyond that. But in just a single glance at a standard commercial web page, more than twenty-five distinct meme transmissions occur. Currently, there are on the order of 39.7 billion individual web pages on the World Wide Web. Multiply that and imagine the virulence of the memes, the number of empty ideas slipping into minds that aren’t even aware of them. With the improvement of imaging technology and Internet capability in standard cells, people are exposed to this virulence every moment of every day. They now crave the stimulation, to the point that its absence feels undesirable. They are, in effect, addicted to meme transmission, and they don’t even know it.”

Through the electronic barrier, Laura could hear the Librarian take a deep breath before continuing. Laura, for her part, was holding on to her breath tight. She felt what was coming in the trickle of sweat down her spine. Beside her, Remak was as motionless as death.

“Now, not all memes are undesirable. But consider that most web pages are initially reached via search engines, their complicated algorithms determining which memes we are most likely to be exposed to. And who determines these algorithms? Who, in effect, decides what ideas we are going to have? The corporations, of course. Just as they determine what we see on television, the music we hear, the news that reaches us. And what do you imagine would be their motive in determining what memes we’re exposed to?”

“Profit,” Remak said, and the word echoed in Laura’s ears like a death sentence.

“Rather. My former employer, Intellitech, was the leader in this field of inquiry. They wanted the ultimate competitive edge: an idea that could transmit spontaneously. That is, an idea that moves from mind to mind without a standard means of communication, in a sort of inadvertent mental telepathy. Imagine an idea that transmits merely by proximity, or via a cell conversation, through voice tone or facial expression. How long until an entire city had this idea lodged in their brains by doing no more than coming too close to a stranger on the street? How long before the entire world is thinking it, simply because someone spoke to a relative on a cell halfway around the world? True viral marketing.

“For this you would need the ideal meme: an idea that combined maximum latent profit with unprecedented level of transmission potential.”

“Hopelessness,” Laura said, barely more than a whisper because she couldn’t catch her breath. The empty look on her parents’ faces, the murderous void in Brath’s eyes, the shudder of despair that ran through Mal’s body when Stoagie didn’t recognize him; what else could give birth to those horrors? Laura could feel the weight of it pressing the air from her body right now.

“Yes, Laura. Hopelessness. And, truly, it was the only way for Intellitech to go. Hopelessness existed already, of course. We have always been so susceptible to it. The media has been trading in it for centuries. It creeps into our heads like a hungry spider and begins feasting.

“But Intellitech wanted it more powerful still. They targeted teens to begin with; they had to. Teens are the largest consumers of media and transmitted culture and are thus the highest meme-transmitting demographic.

“Intellitech already controlled search technology, and they flooded search engine hits with websites that would promote this meme’s transmission. Their tentacles slid out. They began aggressively acquiring a cross section of media properties to accommodate their plans. So, HD channels were flooded with images that would carry the hopelessness meme most potently; they began producing music with words and tones that pushed the meme. Finally, there was nowhere left to turn that the meme wasn’t present.

“Then came their ‘focus groups,’ thinly veiled psychic torture chambers. Teenagers were exposed to headlines of disaster and ruin, simulated images of their own families in agonizing pain. They were shown falsified proof that their own reputations, records, lives were being irrevocably ruined. Data-rich smart liquids were injected directly into the amygdalae, the portion of the brain responsible for emotion.

“And then, then Intellitech got exactly what it needed: Big Black. The initial destruction was bad enough. But soon after, to have a great black symbol of our own ability to de stroy ourselves rising from the skyline of the world’s greatest city … This broke down the final barrier, let the hopelessness come flooding in like a tidal wave. It was so effective, it seems impossible to me that Intellitech didn’t have a hand in it.

“Whatever the case, Intellitech had its success. If that’s what you can call it.” The Librarian’s pauses were filled with a low electronic hum. “In short order, the extraordinary rise in desolated response they had stimulated in their test subjects spread to the doctors administering the experiments, and to the doctors’ families and associates. The idea was catching.”

“Why?” Laura pleaded, nearly in tears. “Why that? Couldn’t they see that it would destroy us?”

“No, Laura, they couldn’t. Corporations are vast living systems with one, single evolutionary imperative: profit. Perhaps Jon has familiarized you with the Global Dynamic? Hopelessness promotes certain behavior patterns crucial to marketing. But it is also a by-product of those same behaviors. It promotes the shortest-term thinking and thus increases sales of blatantly harmful substances like tobacco, liquor, and beverages and foods made primarily of sugars and chemicals. It creates violent impulses of resistance at the same time as a yearning to escape into video games, action movies, and fast, no-thought entertainment at the expense of considered, constructive solution-building. It makes parents forget to care what their children do and children forget to care about how they treat one another. It makes us need more and more and more because no amount is ever enough to fix us, to make us happy. Hopelessness creates all of these conditions, but it also arises from them. Do you see?”

She did. They both did, and the realization was strangling them.

“They did it,” Remak said. “They reverse-engineered the Global Dynamic.”

“They did. They intensified the cycle. Hopelessness creates the need for the product, and the product creates more hopelessness. The supply creates the demand. An ultimate, endless profit loop. Except, when they grew the meme to its ultimate potential, they pushed it so hard that it evolved and mutated into a new form altogether.

“But, in the end, how could they hope to keep control of it? Even the smallest child can tell you: you can’t control an idea. And even in this non-Darwinian evolution, only the strongest survive. Hopelessness is now the strongest, most powerful idea in existence. And it’s alive.”

Electronic silence stretched out. Perhaps the Librarian was trying to figure out a way to undo the meme for the millionth time.

“I found evidence of the earliest stages of Intellitech’s experiments. I left, but continued to monitor them. Of course, it’s grown far beyond Intellitech over the years. Consulting the cooperative’s collected intelligence, I pieced together the disastrous ‘success’ of Intellitech’s project and the ‘escape’ of the meme just within the last few years. I saw desolated response grow. The apparently random incidence of it—not just in the areas and groups it’s associated with, but across all demographics—doubled within the first year. Then tripled from that number in the following year. And it’s growing outward. The mass killings on the Mexican border, those suicide cults that swept through schools here and now into Canada and Western Europe; how much of that is just us and how much of it is something edging us toward a line, pushing us into darkness?

“I’ve watched the cooperative’s efforts to investigate and curtail these outbreaks, but they only continued to increase. That was when I left and isolated myself. I’ve been watching us lose the battle ever since. I’m very sorry to say that you are far from the first cooperative field analyst who has stumbled onto something and disappeared. I see the reports come in and then suddenly stop, because the analyst in question is expunged, just as you have been. You’re the first who’s made it to me, Jon. But the world has been fighting for years what you’ve been running from for the last week.

“Hopelessness is now the only meme that is no longer a passenger in our minds. It can drive us. It is a race unto itself that has its own best interests at heart, and it is simply trying to execute its nature: propagate itself. It has done this so effectively, become such a dominant component in people’s minds that, if everything you told me is true, it has become powerful enough to actually manifest itself physically.”

The electronic silence returned, and Laura looked up at Remak, waiting for him to speak, to offer refutation. But when he spoke, his words rang helpless.

“How do you fight an idea that’s already in you?” Remak said, and though it was barely more than a whisper, it echoed back from the darkness, a needless taunt.

“You can’t, Jon,” the Librarian said. “This meme has mutated into something new, just as sea life evolved into the bipedal forms that eventually became humans. And though it seems to have adopted some sort of a physical representation or location, it truly lives in our minds, in a mindscape, just as we live in the landscape. It moves from one mind to another with the same mechanics and ease with which we step from one room to another. If hopelessness can now control people’s actions, memories, and perceptions, make them see different things from those actually before them or remember things that never happened…” There seemed to be no bearable conclusion to that thought.

“But it can’t control everyone, all the time,” Laura spoke up, refusing to let their chances simply fade into silence. “I mean, look at us. If it could drive everyone else, then all the people we’ve passed on the street in the last day could have gathered and killed us. It may have millions or billions of bodies—or doorways into people’s minds, like you said—but it’s still just one force.”

“Its influence does not seem to be actively exerted all the time, that much is true.” It was hard to tell through the frosty alteration whether the Librarian was being convinced of something or if he was just exploring this for their benefit. “But once it’s in you, it’s always there. Nascent, perhaps, but never absent. It may not always be driving, but it is always riding. And it takes so little for it to slide into the driver’s seat.”

“The hopelessness doesn’t appear to be riding in you,” Remak said.

“I saw it coming far enough in advance to limit my exposure,” the Librarian said. “Hardly an option for everyone.”

“But Mal and me? Jon and Mike?” Laura said desperately. “It hasn’t been able to drive us, take control of us. If it could, why are our lives being stolen from us? The meme has to interact with people based on their psychological makeup, doesn’t it? I mean, Remak was saying, some people commit suicide, others become like drones. Doesn’t it make sense that somewhere along the spectrum, there are people who aren’t affected at all?” Laura gained strength from the fact that they weren’t interrupting to contradict her. “If it travels through our minds like we travel through rooms, can’t a room be cut off by locked doors? What if there are people who can shut the door in their brains and lock out this thing completely? People who are basically immune to this meme?”

The last word echoed away, and there was a long expanse of silence. The electronic hush began to thrum in Laura’s ears, and she wondered if the Librarian had abandoned the conversation. A chill struck her spine. What if the Librarian had actually not escaped at all by isolating himself? What if the meme was already in him, and that was why he denied that there was a way to fight it?

“Jon.” The voice suddenly returned, and its sanitized tone had a different quality now, one of urgency. “There are people in the house, coming through the front and the back.”


“Oh,” Mike said, still at the window, “f*ck me.” He pulled his head back as though the window had given him a shock, and looked at Mal, who pushed past him to get a look.

A trail of cars had come from up the road. Pickup trucks, sedans, two-doors; old, beat-up models of every make that came out of Detroit made up the convoy, about seven or eight at first glance.

“I guess we should be grateful that crappy little town is too small to have its own sheriff,” Mike said, not sounding particularly grateful.

“Go out and talk to them,” Mal said.

“Screw you.”

“Slow them down. They’re not going to listen to me for a second. I’ll go find the others.”

The cars were pulling in, not bothering with the driveway, but simply tearing up patches of lawn and stopping midway to the house before they came to a sluing stop and disgorged the invaders. Men of every appearance began marching up toward the house in an amorphous group: well-dressed or in torn jeans and T-shirts, muscular and suntanned, potbellied, bespectacled, shaggy, and balding. They had clearly come together, but they were in no way of a type. Some were empty-handed, others carried bats, sticks, even a shotgun. A group of them had broken off, were heading around to the back of the house.

Mal was about to grab Mike and fling him out the door, but as his sight fixed on the first of the invaders, he saw something that tightened his jaw and sent an angry buzzing through his brain.

It was in their entire faces, an attitude, really, but it collected around the eyes in a particular way. They had the eyes of the gang standing in front of Tommy’s door that first night, the eyes of Brath just as he shot Isabel. Eyes that were lifeless and dull.

The sight sent a jolt up his body that straightened him out like a board.

“What?” Mike demanded, trying to force his way in to get a look out the window again. “What?”

The invaders were just a few feet from the door.

“Their eyes,” Mal said. “This thing is inside them. It saw us at the gas station, or when we passed through Pope Springs.”

Mike stared back at him.

“Get in the corner,” Mal said.

“What?”

“Get in the corner.” Mal’s voice was suddenly quiet and even, loaded with something that belied his outward calm. Mike ran to the corner beneath the stairway and pressed himself into it.

Mal stood at the wall immediately behind the door, so that when it opened, he would be hidden behind it.

“There are people coming!” he heard Mike yell, for the benefit of the electronic voice. But Mal knew that he was, as always, alone.

Something slammed against the door, one, two, three times, and Mal braced. Just like in my dream, he thought. It’s trying to get in.

There was a crack, and the door swung open straight at him. Mal’s foot came up and kicked the door back hard. It caromed from the sole of his boot and smashed back into something that let out a yelp of pain. There were sounds of movement, stumbling, then two came in at once, one with a bat, the other empty-handed.

Mal had leaped before the door, and he caught the armed one flat in the face with a powerful cross. Beneath the dead eyes, the nose flattened, squirting red, and the man flailed back and fell. Mal slipped the second man’s attack and came back up with two uppercuts to his ample gut. All his air coughed out of him, and he staggered off to the side.

Two more were already in, and two more were coming behind them, fanning out to surround Mal. Mal snapped out a short, quick jab and followed with a powerful curving hook, connecting with both and sending one invader to the floor. The other, however, landed a clumsy backhand full of knuckles across Mal’s turned cheek. Mal came back with a flurry of jabs that took the man out of the fight, his face red and distorted.

But the other two had him, one at each arm, grappling madly, as the rest came flooding in, four more in all, their faces eerie for their empty expressions atop the violent, scrambling bodies.

Mal stomped down on an instep and felt bone crack as the man at his right toppled. But one of the newcomers got a shot into Mal’s stomach, a hard fist slapping into layers of muscle. Then a stick came down on Mal’s head, and he felt warm blood crawling through his hair. Through swimming vision, Mal saw the stick come up again. This time, he punched up as it swung down, his fist connecting with the wrist of the man wielding it, breaking it at the joint with a sharp snap that Mal felt through his knuckles. The stick spiraled through the air and away and the man leaped back, grabbing his wrist.

Four left.


Remak moved. He got to the door and pulled Brath’s slim black automatic out. Laura stared at him in shock.

“What room are you in?” he said to the darkness. “I can get you out of here and take you somewhere safe.”

“I’m not in the house, Jon,” the voice said. “I’m not even in the state. Get yourselves out. They’re coming up the back staircase now. Your friends are holding others at the front door.” The lock on the door clicked open.

“Come on,” Remak said, his voice harsher without rising at all, his hand out to Laura. She jerked into motion, as though having been held back by an invisible barrier. He grabbed her hand, threw the door open, and ran out with her in tow.

Laura screamed. There were men appearing at the back end of the hall, and even from this distance, she saw the haunting emptiness in their eyes, the void that had been in her parents’ eyes the last time she saw them. The first of the men, solidly built, wearing jeans and a plaid hunting shirt, was leveling a shotgun at them.

Remak let go of her hand and grabbed the door he had flung open. Just as the hall boomed with the discharge of the shotgun, he swung the door between them and the men. The sound of metal shot thunking into the wood and striking the metal it was reinforced with carried through the door, and immediately Remak pushed it open again and snapped off a single hissing shot from the hip.

The hunter thrashed, his gun tumbling from his hands, and was flung back as though a rope attached to his back had suddenly pulled taut. He knocked over the man immediately behind him, and the approaching faces retreated behind the door.

Immediately, Laura went into a sprint back down the hall, toward Mal.

“Come on,” she said.

“Go, Laura. I’ll hold them here,” Remak said, pulling the door back for protection.

She skidded to a stop. Leave him here? They needed to—

“Go.”

She did, hurling herself toward the door they’d first come through and, as it clicked open before her, throwing herself through it. She was on the balcony, looking down into the foyer.

Bodies were strewn around the front door, either still or writhing on the floor, favoring an injured part. Mal was surrounded by four men, one holding tightly to his arm, the others firing attack after attack at him. Mal slipped, parried, took a blow to his chest. One of the men had a short metal pipe and swung it, only to have Mal’s fist come down like a hammer and deflect the pipe into his thigh instead, where it landed with a meaty thwack that made Laura wince and Mal grunt hard.

She started down the stairs and saw, from beneath the steps, Mike come running out, snatch up a wooden stick on the floor, and lay awkwardly but fiercely into the head of the man with the pipe. The man turned just in time to catch another blow across the face that cracked the stick in two and sent him to the floor, inert.

Mike staggered back, his eyes wide, thunderstruck at the loss of his weapon. Mal had taken advantage of the opportunity to grab the neck of the man holding his left arm and swing his head hard into the face of one of the two others. The skulls met with a shocking sound that made Laura want to vomit, and Mal finished by plunging his fist into the face of the man he held by the throat. Both men went down, the second only after Mal released him.

She saw something in Mal that she had thought absent, despite his history, a steady, controlled fire lighting his features. Now she realized it had always been present, only contained. There was a whirlwind in Mal, and it had burst out of him.

Even if she had not seen it in the emptiness in the last man’s eyes, it was obvious to Laura that he was being controlled by something. What sort of a fool would throw a punch at an enemy who had just taken out so many opponents?

But the man did. He threw a slow fist before him, and Mal avoided it with a minimal tick of his head, bringing the man down with a merciless fist that seemed to dislocate his jaw.

And instantly, Mal’s body faltered. He held his feet, but the injuries to his leg, torso, and head were immediately clear from the way he turned and moved.

“Where’s Remak?” Mike shouted at her from just a few feet away.

“Coming.” She glanced back up at the balcony. “He’s coming.”

Some of the bodies around them were beginning to rise, their injuries obvious but not stopping them. Three who still stood but had retreated to corners took tentative steps forward.

“We have to go,” Mal said in a rough, hoarse voice.

“Who has the keycard?” Mike demanded, already knowing it was Remak. “Shit!”

Laura’s frantic eyes saw a chain of actual old-fashioned keys hanging from the back pocket of a man at Mal’s feet. She stooped down and tore it off.

“Go,” she said to Mike, grabbing Mal’s arm. Supporting him would have been a trick, but he carried himself, limping badly on one leg as they careened out the door and down the stairway.

There were five keys on the ring, but only one of them fit a car, and it worked on the third one she tried, a dented blue Chevy adorned with ancient streaks of rust. When the door was opened, she flung the keys to Mike and began helping Mal into the back.

“Uh,” Mike said, holding the keys before him, “I can’t drive.”

“What?”

“Look,” he said, incensed by the question regardless of the situation, “not everybody in the whole goddamned world knows how, okay? I failed my test and didn’t bother going back—I live in New York City, for Christ’s sake. Is that okay with you?”

She snatched the keys back and helped Mal lower himself into the front passenger seat, then raced around and got in.

The car closed and locked, they sat and stared at the open doorway of the house. They could see bodies moving up the stairs. Two faces appeared in the doorway, scanning them with lifeless gazes.

“Start the engine,” Mike said from the back, his hand gripping the front seat hard.

“What about Jon?”


Remak fired a shot down the hall into the wall, causing the man reaching for the shotgun to retreat once again. There was a single bullet left.

“There are more men coming up the front stairs as well,” the Librarian’s voice echoed just behind him in the metal room. “They’re injured, but there’s a substantial number.”

Remak turned toward the door at the front of the hall, awaiting the rush.

“There’s a room across the hall from you,” the voice said. “There’s equipment in it you might be able to use, and another way out. Go fast—there isn’t much time left.”

Remak didn’t hesitate.

“God help you,” the Librarian’s voice echoed as Remak left it behind him.


Three men were coming out of the house, one armed with a pipe, another with a bat. They favored their injured parts, but they were being driven by a force beyond them.

“We can’t wait,” Mike said. “Who knows what else is coming this way? Remak has the keys. If he makes it out, he c an—”

“I’ll go back in for him,” Mal said, smearing his headrest with blood.

A rush of flame burst through the windows of the top floor, followed immediately by a low whumpf. Almost instantly, another burst shattered the second-floor windows, the charred curtains flapping outward on the wave of heat. Men were tumbling out of the building now, some staggering, others being carried. Finally, flame rushed out after them from the ground floor as well.

“Okay, go ahead,” Mike said from the back.

“Oh, God,” Laura said. “Jon.”

The three approaching men had not even turned to see the flame engulfing the house. A mere ten feet away, one of them raised his pipe.

“Go! Would you go, for the love of God?” Mike yelled.

The pipe flew from the man’s hand and rang off the windshield, leaving a spider web of cracks in front of Laura’s face. She stamped down on the gas and swung the wheel so that the car slewed to the side. The man with the bat ran up and swung it down, creating another chaos of fissures along the side window, even as the car thumped into him and sent him careening backwards.

The last man chased the car futilely as it gathered speed down the lawn and onto the gravel road. They raced away, and the sight of the weird, empty men gathering before the burning house disappeared around a bend of forest.