I looked not me in the eye. Which was weird, while he was wearing Kaye's zombie form.
"Look," I said. "I just used a cheap trick to get away. Bonus, I got to experience the feeling of my hands traveling through my chest at eighty miles an hour.
“So sure, I'm a maybe little bit excited about taking the tall man's luck. But I can't see how that helps us. I thought the goal was to get to the end of the day. I thought we were supposed to move on to day two. I thought I was going to get to grow stronger and develop superpowers and rock this. But instead... All I've managed to do is discover I've got a knack for getting myself killed. And also, apparently, for pissing off the underworld. Or... Wherever... This sort of spooky shit comes from."
Zombie Kay folded her arms and studied me.
"Well, I will give you this, kid," Not-me said. "You certainly do have a knack for getting yourself killed. I didn't know I had it in me. Hats off to you. All I needed was superpowers, and I would have ended myself in the stupidest way I could have thought of. You're lucky that I've got us fixed to a point in time. Because you would have not survived figuring this out."
I made a scoffing sound at that. If Not-me wanted a thank you, he was barking up the wrong tree to think that he could get one from me right now. My chest kept twinging with phantom aches. I kept noticing and hyperfixating on small details of the bathroom I was in.
The green tiling on the wall, but only halfway up the wall. Beyond it, sterile-looking drywall. As if whoever wanted to encase the room in green couldn't be bothered to play their miniature game of Tetris all the way to the ceiling. The chipping chrome holding the mirror fixture in place kept drawing my eye. The lines and scratches carved into it. The years evident in the use in the building. The porcelain sink in front of me in particular. It had stains that looked like they could never be undone. I was following one that was ranging somewhere in between brown, gray, and green and trying to decide what color it was.
"Hey. Would you quit looking down and look up when I'm trying to talk to you?"
Not Me's voice came tumbling out of my own mouth. Not from some phantom place from Mirrorland or whatever the heck through the looking glass was going on there, but my own lips opened and involuntarily spouted Not-me's voice. This was the first time this had happened, and it startled me so bad I yelped.
I looked up at the mirror and Zombie Kay had a cross look on her face.
"What? How did you do that?" I said.
"I think you're going into shock. You were starting at a point somewhere below this mirror for the better part of fifteen minutes."
I shook my head.
"No. No, I couldn’t have been. I was only looking at that stain." I stopped. Trying to think back. Trying to honestly see whether I had been stuck or whether Not-me was exaggerating. How long had I stood here?
I shifted my body. My feet were sore. That wasn't a good sign. Lifting one foot and then the other, I felt my body protest as if I had been stationary for a long period of time.
I shook my head, looking up at Not-me.
"Wha—" I began. Cleared my throat. Tried again. "What's going on?"
"You've been through a lot," Not Me said. "And you're beginning to go into shock."
“Hey!” Not-me snapped his fingers, the noise loud and startling. “Keep your eyes up here. Square breathing. You know how to do this. Look,” Not-me looked down at the floor.
At first, I was tempted to follow his gaze. Then I realized that he appeared to be self-conscious. This was the first time ever I'd seen any sort of emotion on him.
“I don't know what it feels like to watch yourself die over and over again. You got that on me, kid. But I do know what it feels like to watch the people you love die—in brutal, horrific fashion. You can get through this. Stop focusing on it. Set it aside. Set your goal in mind.”
I shook my head back and forth slowly.
“Goal?” I said. “What goal? I thought the goal was to get to the end of today. I thought the goal was to get on some drug lord's most wanted list. I thought the goal was to join up with Cece and do some ‘dealing’.” I made air quotes.
Not-me shook his head. “Oh no, this is a longer game we’re playing, kid. We're talking about the actual zombie apocalypse.”
I scoffed. “Now I know you're joking. Like, come back from the dead zombie apocalypse?”
Not Me shook his head. “Not that. I would almost prefer that. We are about eight years out from brain implant technology becoming household-common. There are apps out there right now laying the groundwork, seeding the soil, as it were, with weeds. Someone out there is smart enough to have begun counter-programming against the future. And there is brainwashing currently being seeded into social media that is going to take control of the implant technology once it happens. You remember that National Geographic shit about the bug-eating zombie mushroom?”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
The bug-eating zombie... And then it clicked. I did. It had been about five years back that I had watched this special. It wasn't National Geographic. It was a show called Planet Earth in which they showed how there was a type of fungus that would take over the minds of ants. The ant would no longer be in control of its body, but it would have an irresistible desire to climb to the highest point it could, at which the fungus would burst out of the ant's head like a slow-motion gore-o-rama film and release spores into the area that would affect other ants. And this was how this insectivorous fungus spread.
I shuddered, remembering that and being horrified that there might be the implication that there was some human-infecting fungus out there. I didn't point out Not Me's inaccuracy with National Geographic. Instead, I nodded slowly, naming the species of fungus as the information came readily back to me.
“Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, commonly known as the zombie-ant fungus,” I said.
Not Me nodded. “Yeah, I forgot how good you were at remembering. That's the one. It's like that, but it's digital.
“Think about it this way. The next wave of technology will be direct brain implant chips. They're being pioneered. We're testing right now. People who are paraplegics are gaining the ability to interact with the world again.
“Once this technology becomes commonplace and everybody has a chip in their brain instead of a smartphone in their hand, what happens if the preceding technology has been laid as groundwork to take them over on a zombie apocalypse scale?”
I thought about it. “So, people who have the chips lose control of themselves?”
Not Me nodded.
“To what end?” I asked.
“World War fucking three. Militarizing citizens against their own government in order to incite an overthrow”
“Wait,” I interjected. “I thought you got excited when I was able to steal luck from a heart attack. What does the political atmosphere of an inciting incident—that results in World War III—have to do with a spiritual entity like the Tall Man or a heart attack?”
“Well, that's the hell of it, kid,” Not-me said. “There are ‘spiritual entities’ that run countries. The powers behind the thrones, so to speak. They're the ones pushing things for war.”
“The divine?” I asked.
Not-me moved his hand back and forth in a ‘sort-of’ gesture.
“You can think of them that way. Some people certainly worship them as if they were. Their goal? World conquest. That's what all these things are vying for. And so, if you want to make a good and lasting change inside the world government in attempting to prevent World War III, you have to fight the monsters that are the powers behind the throne that are driving human thought towards this eventual apocalyptic end.”
“How bad does it get?” I asked.
“We're talking about the loss of eighty percent of the global population in under ten years of fighting.
“We're talking about being knocked back to the Stone-Age in order to try and prevent the widespread pandemic of the zombie computer virus.
“We're talking about people having to learn rudimentary fire-making skills and learning to snare their food like a fucking caveman.
“We're talking about the end of civilization as we know it, and man's great reboot event, in which people are too afraid to use technology because they don't know if it's going to infect them or not. Superstitions and cults abound, and in another thirty years, all of it is forgotten.
“The wealth of human knowledge that we've built up, erased by our own foolish grasping. And the powers that rule the human luck-harvests, begin fighting for the scraps. And we see a resurgence of the paranormal as the monsters begin to come out to play because there aren't enough people who don't believe in them holding the darkness back.”
“Wait,” I said, holding up a hand. “You mean the only reason that werewolves aren't eating people here in America is because there are large groups of people that don't believe in them?”
Not-me nodded slowly, a wicked-looking smile creeping across his face.
“It doesn't eliminate them, but it does hold them where they are. They get stuck in-between. With enough people not-believing in their existence, they're unable to set foot into this reality. But the problem is, once our critical line of scientific knowledge—in which we think we know the measure of the world—gets destroyed and superstitions make a resurgence, the supernatural begins to step onto the plane of reality. And our reality becomes what we believe it is. There are monsters out there. Our own willful ignorance towards them holds them at bay. That madness lying in wait in the dark only lacks the ability to strike at us with our own determined certainty that it can't reach us. The minute it talks us into the reality of its existence, it gains permission to step onto this plane of reality and lay hold of the delicacy that is choice where they come from.”
I could tell Not Me wanted to ask, and so I bit. “And what's that?”
“Human meat,” Not-me finished, a smug smile of satisfaction with a punchline duly delivered.
"So what are you saying?" I asked, throwing my arms wide. "I have to luck-murder my way up a chain of spiritual gang lords until I can finally face down a god?"
I pointed to my chest, where my core was still brimming with plus-24 luck. "I'm nearly at capacity," I said. "Taking out the heart attack took everything I had, from absolute zero all the way to plus-36. What am I supposed to do to grow stronger? What will these entities have? More? Less? Is the amount that the heart attack was carrying the limit? Do you know?"
I was feeling fed up. "If you want me to become some sort of superhero," I pointed, my finger bouncing off the mirror, wishing I could jab Not-me in the chest, "I need a way to grow stronger," I said.
My voice echoed around the bathroom, uncomfortably loud. I became suddenly self-conscious maybe somebody was hiding in the stalls. I snuck a peek underneath each one and saw bare porcelain. The stall doors were closed, but there was no apparent student inside. If there was someone in one, they were hiding up on the toilet tank. Whatever. I decided I didn't care. I turned back to the mirror.
Zombie Kay was stroking her chin.
"Not exactly," Not-me said. "I'm not talking about murdering gods. I'm talking about upsetting the balance of power in favor of one of the entities not interested in orchestrating the next world war."
I gave him the side eye. “This is beginning to sound an awful lot like the men in black.”
Not-me started to laugh. "You have no idea. There's something like that out there, you know. I was a sidekick.”
I looked at him. "What do you mean?" I asked.
Not-me jutted his chin out and looked thoughtful. "There's something happening."
The words triggered a memory of Kaye talking to me under the tree.
"An awakening of sorts. You can see shadows of the future often portrayed in media. One where they paint a crisp and clear picture of a possible future. I'm talking about superheroes. People that develop unusual ‘giftings’, able to do more.
“You are headed towards an unusual future. One in which technology is not the only scary bugaboo that's seeking to derail the world economy. But we are headed into a time in which there will be monsters and heroes, and they're going to walk the city streets hidden amongst the populace and an ignorant mass."
“And you were a sidekick? Like with a costume and everything?" I asked.
He pointed at me. "You were. In your quest to find dad." He looked me in the eye. "No, I haven't forgotten." He sucked on a tooth for a moment and turned his back. "No, I never found him. I'm beginning to think maybe we could change that."
I thought about that for a long moment. Looking at the back of Zombie-Kaye’s head. Dad…
"So how do I grow stronger?" I asked.
Not-me squinted at me. "Well, the simple psychic shit and being clever, it's not going to be enough. Being a luck vampire might be just… just the ticket to secure you an awakening.”
I began to laugh. I laughed and laughed. It didn't approach the hysteria I had experienced near the tree, but it was too much.
"You know, if I wasn't living through this, I wouldn't believe it," I said. "This is some real Saturday-morning-cartoon shit. You're talking about unlocking some mutant gene or something?"
"It's not like that. Magic's real. Just our world has lost touch with it and most of it had left for a parallel dimension. What you need is to bond with a magical entity that will unlock an affinity. You don't get to choose, but you might get lucky."
Not-me grinned. It was a disturbing look on zombie Kaye. The maniac grin. I realized then what was wrong. It was Kaye…. Except the teeth were wrong. Too long. Always the teeth were wrong.
I needed to get away from this mirror.
"All right," I said. "What do we gotta do?"
Not-me's smile grew even more disturbing. "Put another phone call in to Cece. It's time to go talk to Jemima and figure out who the current gateway player is. I'm betting that we still need to go make that connection with the drug lord. It's just not going to be for the purposes we had originally set out for."
***