Hiding had always come easy to Gordon Daylard, almost as easy as running, looking the other way, and ignoring the desperate voices in his head that repeatedly scolded him about the direction of his life. He’d crammed himself between two concrete pillars in the only section of the parking lot untouched by an endless loop of flashing advertisements from the surrounding buildings. Whatever was to happen next would either confirm the internal voices’ years of worry or silence them for good, allowing Gordon to maybe have a good night’s sleep for a change.
The wary inhabitant of the tangle of webs that swayed in the hot air of his breath was the only living thing to keep him company for the past few hours. Two aircars were parked in his limited field of view. The jet black ’48 Piercer had been there in all its luxury when he’d first arrived. The common ten-year-old beige Glidester with rust spots on the swinging back door came later. A tired nurse had wheezed as she’d pulled herself from the car, took a deep drag of her smoke, coughed, and spat something awful onto the concrete floor — the smack and echo still rang in Gordon’s mind, sickening him — and she’d left.
For the last two months, nothing mattered more to Gordon than the story he’d been chasing. It all started when he’d heard two young men talking at a bar. There’d been nothing special about the kids. One had lime green hair and a dozen lip rings, and the other had an altered left arm painted with flames, the typical kind of thing folks tended to regret doing to themselves once they grew up. Despite all that, the subject of their conversation is what had caught Gordon’s attention.
“It’s all lies, dude,” the green-haired one had said. “You really think the government cares about you? About any of us?” He’d laughed as if they were talking about something as unlikely as a human sprouting wings and flying. “The dolo are just another story cooked up by the Gilzak family to keep us scared, and in turn, controlled. It’s obvious to anyone willing to open their eyes.”
“But why would they lie?” The other one crushed a half-filled beer can with his altered arm. He’d cursed and mopped up the mess with the barely absorbent napkins offered by the slot in the table. The procedure must’ve been recent. It took months to get used to the strength of an altered limb. “They live under the dome with the rest of us. If the threat were nonsense like you say, wouldn’t the rich get the hel outta here? And what about soldiers? They deploy the army to fight the dolo. Wouldn’t someone talk if it were all made up?”
The green-haired guy had chuckled—two quick shots of breath that dismissed what Gordon thought were good points. “I’ve heard those arguments before. I’ve heard ‘em all. Listen.” He leaned closer. Gordon had risked halving the distance between him and the conversation. He’d ignored his wife’s signal for him to return to their table. “If a simple, insignificant citizen like you can come up with these arguments, don’t you think the powers that rule us might think of them too?”
No response. A monotonous, bumping track had continued through its third hour of consecutive play. A pack of mindless dancers obscured the path of view between Gordon and his wife on the smoke and laser-lit dancefloor, allowing his ignoring of her to more easily pass as accidental.
“Don’t get offended by the insignificant remark,” the green-haired guy said. “I’m as insignificant as you. Everyone in this bar is. Everyone who isn’t part of the four families is.”
“Man, Jessica said you were ‘out there,’ but wow,” the other one said.
“Jessica also really wants us to get along,” Green hair said. “Alright, I’ll shut up about it. Some people are more open than others. No problem. I’ll just ask you one more question before I drop it. Do you fear anything else that you’ve never seen?”
No response.
“What are the dolo?”
“Giant insects that live outside the dome,” Alter Arm said. “They hunt people.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the new—”
“Because the news says so,” Green Hair interrupted. “The news that is owned one hundred percent by one of the four families, the news that has no competitors. The only time you’ve ever seen the dolo or heard anything about them was from the news. If you ignored the media your whole life, you would have lived twenty years without ever knowing the dolo existed. Just think about that.”
“I’m thankful we have a team of journalists to keep us informed,” Alter Arm said. “Maybe, if not for the news, I would have left the city like a fool. I’d be bug shit by now.”
Green Hair leaned back and sighed. His eyes met with Gordon’s. Gordon forced an awkward cough, looked around, feigning some alternate purpose for being so close to their table, and wandered back to his wife soon after. It had been a harmless conversation between two sogroot huffers, but for some reason, it’d sent Gordon on a wild investigation that led him to where he was now. Half-asleep in a nearly deserted parking lot with one eye frequently flicking up to keep tabs on a spider.
Eleven years of journalistic experience and seniority at the Triple G network’s most prominent news site on the web had earned Gordon enough trust for him to sleuth around the office without arousing suspicion. He’d used that trust to look up every story the office had ever run on the dolorium. He’d investigated the author behind each article — seventy-six total over the last five years — which all turned out to be written by only two journalists: Sammy Gilzak—oldest son to one of the company’s owners—and Mort Mallard. Few people angered Gordon more than Mort Mallard.
Finding their sources had been the difficult part until he’d hired some lower-class hacker to get access to their schedules. Both had multiple meetings planned in the next few months with Jerry Gilzak. A little bit of digging showed that Jerry Gilzak owned a credit loaning house that specifically helped army veterans. Veterans of an army that served a single purpose. Defending against the dolo.
After purchasing a mask and getting a temporary voice alter, one that gave his wife many extra years onto her life through the medicine of laughter, Gordon visited Jerry Gilzak at his place of business and interrogated him about the two journalists. He’d threatened the loaner’s son, who he’d learned about through research. Thankfully, Jerry Gilzak fell for the bluff and revealed that Governor Nateson of the Slupman District, and Sakero MoShun, a high-level businessman in one of the four families, were going to meet soon. Gordon had asked what the meeting would be about. Jerry had revealed that only two things were on the docket: bugs and the big cheese. Gordon had asked where. Jerry had answered, “fifth floor, section Q of the Ruby Rings Hospital parking lot.”
A pair of aircars rushed in from the docking ramp. Their propulsion pipes stirred up a gust of stray sand and pebbles. Gordon closed his eyes and lifted the front of his black shirt over his nose to filter his quickening breaths. This was it. Two months of work, all for this moment. He’d given more than twelve hours of every day to hunting the story. Marene had complained about him never being home. She’d claimed the loneliness was what had been triggering her mood swings. Gordon scoffed at the thought. She’d blamed his being at home too often for her mood swings during the work stoppage five years back. Her mood swings were older than their marriage.
The cars stopped, and the dust settled. They parked on the brink of his field of view. Both were black, clean, and in flawless condition. Each was worth far more than Gordon would ever be willing to pay for a car.
Hydraulic doors hissed open. Hard-soled shoes knocked against the stone floor, sending echo after echo to fill the hollow lot much like the nurse’s spit had done. Two men spoke quiet words. The bass of their voices hummed through the lot, incoherent. Only the sharp accents of their t’s and s’s provided any clue as to what they might’ve been saying. It wasn’t enough.
Gordon leaned forward, closer to the spiderweb, to get a better view. It wasn’t Nateson or MoShun who conversed, but their drivers. They chatted a bit longer about something serious. Their black suits lit up from the advertisements as if from a slow strobe light.
They separated, difficult to follow with the confusion of the lighting. They moved like an old animation with dozens of missing frames between each image. A deep pounding asserted itself beneath Gordon’s skull. He’d been confined between the pillars without food, water, and only the foul air of the parking lot to breathe for too long. The headache didn’t surprise him, but it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
The drivers opened the back-seat doors to their respective cars. A man exited the first car, and two came out of the second. The one who traveled alone was Governor Nathan Nateson. His swollen paunch was unmistakable. How a man of his weight was still mobile was a miracle. What was most odd about the governor’s physique was that his midsection was the only place where any fat settled. Every other part of him would not have been out of place on the body of an athlete.
Sakero MoShun fixed his black tie and made his way toward the spherical governor. The green flash from the current ad revealed his narrow, old-eastern eyes, the scar on his chin, and the straight shag of matte black hair that fell in a neat diagonal line across his permanently furrowed brow. His posture was rigid as if the weight of the world descended on his shoulders, but he carried it with dignity and without complaint.
Stolen novel; please report.
With him was a man dressed in a similar black suit. The lot went dark for a moment to make way for a red ad that shone off the man’s bald head and the metal of his altered face. Gordon had only ever heard of a modified face. No one provided such a service publicly, at least not in his district. The nose was compact, made to look like the nose hole on a human skull. A metal band circled his head where his eyes used to be. The skin of his brow and his lower orbital bones healed over the metal, accepting it as part of the body. Shining red pupils danced around in dark sockets, scanning the room, eager to destroy whatever they might find.
The hefty governor held out his hand, offering a shake. Sakero regarded it for a moment, pulled a small box from his inner breast pocket, produced a cigarette, and handed it over to Nateson’s waiting hand. With a few movements, deceptive and quick as a magician, Sakero exchanged the box of cigarettes in his hand for a four-inch torch, lit the governor’s cigarette, then the one in his mouth that Gordon hadn’t seen him place.
Two lit cigarettes and a pair of hungry red eyes were all there was in the parking lot when the ads changed. Each instance sent a chill up Gordon’s spine. He was in it now. Hiding away, spying on two of the city’s most influential figures. One mistake, and he was worse than dead. Marene was right. A new ad doused the meeting in bright, cyan light. The light never reached Gordon’s small section of the lot.
“You find the place alright?” Nateson’s raw voice broke the silence.
Gordon flinched at the sudden wall of noise. He could almost feel it against his clammy skin. He shoved his hand in his pocket, took out his sound collection card, and tapped the red circle icon to start recording. He dropped the card back in his pocket. The memory on the card was completely vacant—thousands of terabytes ready to immortalize whatever conversation was about to take place. With great sound, too. Ironically, the device was an invention of the MoShun family.
“I’m here, ain’t I?” Sakero MoShun stared at the floor, projecting an air of disinterest.
“Sorry about meeting here,” Nateson said. “My wife and a few campaign donors had reservations at your restaurant tonight.” He chuckled. “What are the odds, right?”
“I hate last-minute changes.” Sakero sounded nowhere near as amused by the coincidence as the governor. “I conduct all-important meetings there. You know why? The staff knows to leave me alone once I’ve been served my food, and they know to keep any unwanted ears away, that’s why.”
“Apologies,” Nateson said. “I just figured it might be awkward to leave my company for more than ten minutes without arousing suspicion. I told her something came up instead.”
“The way you eat, I don’t think anyone would question a prolonged bathroom break,” Sakero looked the governor in the eye now, almost daring him to laugh or not laugh at the half-joke half-insult. “It doesn’t matter. We’re here now, so we might as well get this over with.”
“I had my men check the place out before we got here,” Nateson said. “It’s clean.”
“If I trusted you or your men’s judgement, I wouldn’t have my friend with me,” Sakero threw a lazy thumb over his shoulder to the man with the altered face. “If the place is bugged, he’ll find out.” He turned his chin and nodded to his friend a second before the light from the ad cut to black.
Red eyes swayed up and down. They flicked left to right to left, never blinking. The returning yellow light revealed that the man with the altered face had been pacing with purpose in a direct course with Gordon.
His mouth dried, and he could barely swallow. His heart pumped at an intense pace, but his mind worked like an engine in need of oil. He needed to think of something, but no matter how many steps the man with the altered face took, the only thought that found any purchase in Gordon’s mind was: He knows I’m here.
Gordon retreated deeper into the shelter of his two pillars. The spider that made him uneasy before now seemed as insignificant as the loose thread at the end of his sleeve. He lost sight behind the concrete, but piercing footsteps kept coming. Until they stopped. Echoes and the claustrophobic space of the lot made the distance of sounds impossible to discern. There was no telling how close the man had come.
He thought about peeking. He also thought about how stupid of a thought that might have been. Frozen with indecision, he looked up to the spider as if it were some all-knowing god, impervious to any of the possible outcomes that Gordon was a slave to. Perhaps he could find a drop of wisdom in any creature, mindless or not. The web was empty. Even the spider knows to get the hel out of here.
It was too late for that. Gordon swallowed what little his dry mouth could muster and pulled himself out from his hiding spot, one inch of his forehead at a time until the two lit cigarettes came into view. They were alone in the dark void of the parking lot. Where are the eyes?
A cool breeze slithered over the back of his neck. Death’s whisper. He knew the red eyes were there with him in the shelter of the pillars. He could feel them. A presence loomed behind, but he hadn’t the courage to look. Better to not see it coming, he supposed.
“Clear?” Sakero’s deep voice nearly made Gordon cry out in fear.
The breeze on his nape warmed. Gordon slammed his eyes shut. Farmlands folk might have prayed at a time like this, but he didn’t see how it could’ve helped. Instead, he took his final moments to apologize to his wife. The words were internal, and she’d never hear them, but it felt necessary.
An ad lit the parking lot, the change of illumination visible through Gordon’s closed eyes. “Clear.” The voice was almost virtual, as if it were spoken into a plastic tube. It was close, but it came from in front of him, not behind. Gordon’s eyes shot open, and he peered ahead through damp locks of his black air. The man with the altered face stood halfway between Gordon and the meeting, about twenty paces away. His back, which was all Gordon could see, bathed in the red light of the ad that seemed to strip everything of its third dimension.
Gordon glanced over his shoulder. Nothing. Was the breeze in my head?
“I need you to leak something to your people in the media,” Sakero said. “General Wolf and his squadron are dead.”
“They are?” Nateson gasped.
“I had someone take care of it,” MoShun said. “Tell the media they died valiantly fighting the dolorium. Make sure they emphasize the hopelessness of the situation. Even our greatest heroes couldn’t turn the tide against the bugs, and so on…”
There it was. From the moment he’d heard those boys talking about some far-out conspiracy in the bar two months ago, he’d been seeking a moment like this. A moment that could turn what was once a curious suspicion into a confirmed story of immense proportions. The kind of story that etched a journalist’s name in the history records forever. The sort of story that allowed one to never worry about money again. The kind of story that commanded respect from one’s wife.
Governor Nateson held his cigarette in the corner of his wide grin and rested his crossed arms on his paunch. “Finally convinced the old chief to see things our way, did you?”
“Irrelevant.” Sakero dropped his cigarette and choked it with a single twist of his Gournay shoe. The shoes cost more than Gordon’s car. He could’ve afforded them, but it was a needless purchase. A waste. “The ancient bastard won’t be around for much longer.”
Gordon’s lips parted at the statement. The ancient bastard could’ve only been Ortio Bismock Willodroudt. The man who’d brought the four families together almost a hundred years ago. The man who’d allowed peace to bloom within the city. The man who ruled Leon City. But what—
“What do you mean by that?” Governor Nateson asked the question for Gordon. His arms untangled and slid off the sheer cliff of his gut. One shot up to rip the cigarette from lips gone lame with shock. “You don’t mean… I mean… You’re not gonna… What do you mean by that?”
Sakero smirked. “You just worry about leaking the dolo thing to the media.”
Gordon pulled the sound collecting card from his pocket and positioned it so that he was sure the tiny microphone hole was unobstructed and aimed well at the conversation.
“Boss.” The man with the altered face raised a fist, signaling for silence.
“What is it?” Sakero’s narrow eyes both fixed on his companion though his head never moved.
A strange sound came from the man with the altered face—something like a hissing snake trapped in a sewage pipe but played in reverse. The man turned, bringing his metallic face into view. He was sniffing. The man was sniffing the air with the enthusiasm of a rat catching the scent of a corpse.
“Someone’s here,” Metal Face said. “B.O.”
“What?” Sakero said, his patience unwavering.
“Body odor,” Metal Face laughed. “Smells like pits in here.”
Gordon lifted his arm and took a whiff. It was him alright. With all the painstaking precautions he’d taken to keep himself from being made, something as trivial as forgetting to shower was what was going to ruin everything. Sweat had seeped from every pore when Metal Face started walking straight for him. There was nothing he could’ve done about it. He pinned his arms against his sides as if that did anything to stop the smell.
Nateson put his hands up in surrender. “Don’t look at me. I had my MoShun Aide hose me off five minutes before coming here.”
“It’s not you,” Metal Face said. The ad faded, blanketing the parking lot in blackness. The red eyes wandered until they fixed onto Gordon. He retreated behind the pillar, his heart rate finding the intense speed it had seen earlier. “It’s coming from over there.”
Sakero laughed. “It’s a hospital parking lot, Doors. What do you expect? We work these nurses half to death. They’re obviously gonna come out here smelling like that. Not to mention all the sick people who slither in and out of this lot.” The lights came back. Sakero was glaring at Nateson. “Come to think of it, why would you pick such a disgusting place for our meeting?”
Nateson was about to speak.
“Don’t answer that,” Sakero said. “Are your instructions clear?”
Doors continued to sniff but remained stationary.
“You’ll have every news site and cast in the district talking about it within twenty-four hours,” Nateson said. “And about the comment regarding the old man,” there was an awkward pause filled only with Doors’ sniffing until the governor spoke again. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“I know you didn’t,” Sakero said. “Honestly, there’s nothing to hear. It’s a rumor right now. One I have nothing to do with. I definitely won’t do anything to stop it, but I’m not the one behind it.”
“Well, I’d like to find out who is behind it,” Nateson said. “If only to shake his hand.”
Sakero whistled. The piercing sound rang in Gordon’s skull. Doors’ footsteps receded, and a car door opened. “Trust me, governor. You do not want to find out who’s behind it. It wouldn’t end well for you. Leak the story, Nateson. Talk to you soon.”
Gordon risked a peek. Doors and MoShun disappeared into their aircar. Nateson finished his smoke with a sour grimace and knocked on the window of his car. His driver exited and opened the swinging back door, and helped the governor manage his ample girth into the back seat. Both cars started up, the engines whirred and conjured another storm of dust. Gordon lifted his shirt over his nose and mouth and closed his eyes until the whooshing of the cars faded and the dust settled. But he wasn’t alone.