The Blue Light Project (41 page)

Light. Unexpected and enormous. They came with light. How do the tough guys say it?
Bring it.
These were tough guys. They
brought
the light. Soundless and endless light, a celestial explosion of luminance. It gauzed the room. If Pegg were still seeing—if that’s technically what he was doing through his clenched-shut eyes—then it was white and blue filaments that could be seen. White, blue, and the veins in his own eyelids. Pegg thought he could see his own platelets moving, shivering there in the incandescence. Not illumination, note. This sort of light didn’t throw itself
onto
anything. It didn’t reveal. It only obliterated the darkness in favor of itself. Suddenly and violently. Pegg felt it like a physical assault on his skin. The crush of a new atmosphere, a deeper pressure. The thing fisted his optic nerves and tossed him. Pegg was on his feet one second, then blown over the next. Something seemed to hammer both his temples at once, and down he went. Blinded twice in two very different ways. Maybe something the size of the universe really was fucking with him.

I’ve been hit,
he thought.
Just like in the movies.
His face contorted, twisting into itself. He felt penetrated and afraid. His body coursing with electrical currents. He thought a spill of thoughts, like fever dreams at an accelerated pace. He thought:
They’re using electricity.
He thought:
I’m going to die.
He thought:
This is the light I’ve heard about, the one at the moment of death.
He thought:
My body is disappearing.

He curled shut, his fists and toes painfully cramping.

Then, the voices. And here Pegg registered something with chilling certainty: the men were not shouting. He wanted them to shout. He wanted to hear them yell.
Down! Clear! Secure!
He wanted martial action of the extreme and definitive kind.
Lock down! Stack up! Close!
Whatever the words were. He wanted the safety of the good guys’ violent program. But he heard none of it. They spoke with bureaucratic, death-industry calm. Most unsettling. They moved into the
room, ghosted into this inhospitable light. Pegg could feel them all around, not shadows or shapes, barely outlines. They were force fields, linked together, and they spidered through the room in programmed sequence. They seized space and held it. Hands on them all. The children were screaming. Gerry was screaming. Pegg himself might have been screaming, he couldn’t have been sure. He was listening for Mov, though. Listening for the sound. And then he heard it, or he thought he heard it. The last sounds of Mov were a cadenza like this:
pop, pop, pop.

Pegg was being handcuffed but something like vision was creeping back to life behind his eyes. There was a voice above him, distant at the command end of two hands that vised him into immobility. That voice said: “I have the second man.”

This crackled through the airwaves.
Man two. Man two.
And then he saw them. The children. Six of them, Gerry in the lead. Hyacinth behind him. Then Roshawn, Laisha, Reebo, Metric. No more screaming. They were up in the dazzling, spotted brilliance, they seemed to be floating. Drifting towards the door.

“Micah,” Pegg said. And then he was up himself and being carried. Dragged, really. There was a hand on either side, his legs banging painfully across a sill, a step. He smelled street air, alley air, sweet garbage, sweet urban rot. His vision returning in layers. He could see black and chrome now. The sheen of running water. He saw a sewer drain and an ambulance. He was in an ambulance. This was news. It rooted him. He was in a vehicle, in a bed. He was strapped to the gurney. Somebody was working his arm, rubbing his skin with a cold swab. He felt the needle go home and the wave of something moving inside him, not unpleasant.

“Micah,” Pegg said again.

And then a familiar voice from very close. “Man two. We’re mobile. Please move now, driver. Thank you.” The lurch and the rattle of
things in cases. Sutures and swabs, scalpels and injector pens. They were going somewhere in an ambulance.

“What happened?” Pegg asked. More vision. Haden here, creased brow, black turtleneck under a jacket with a familiar frog lapel pin. The frog winked at Pegg, as if it recognized him.

“All good,” Haden said. He was leaned in very close to Pegg, their faces almost touching. Pegg realized that Haden was going through his pockets. His tape recorder. Haden was taking his tape recorder. Under normal circumstances, Pegg would have objected loudly. But it didn’t really bother or surprise him at the moment.

“Tell me,” Pegg said. “The light.”

“Super-halogen tissue convulsant,” Haden said. “Get some rest, you got dosed good. It puts you out for a minute or two, but nothing long term. You’re going home.”

“The kids?”

“Safe and sound. All six. Nice work, by the way. Night-vision, check. Once we knew that, the guy was fucked. A burst of super-halogen into infrared filters means your brain is never the same again.” And Pegg was swept with emotion hearing all this. He had most certainly been expendable to Haden, or at least his brain had been. But he’d pulled off his night-vision and the children were alive. They were all breathing, with a future ahead and plans to eat french fries. And with this thought the ambulance seemed to swerve hard right. Gravity went sideways and stayed sideways for so long that Pegg began to wonder if it was perhaps only his own gravity. Haden looked like he was comfortably centered. He looked like he was going straight.

“What about the bomb?” Pegg asked.

Haden was staring forward now, past Pegg to the road ahead, a seam of concern working itself into place across his forehead. The ambulance was slowing, horns sounding. Haden said: “Fuck.” Then glanced down at Pegg and did something unexpected. He put his hand on
Pegg’s arm. He said: “The briefcase. The bomb. Once you were all down and convulsing, our guys went over and cut off his hand.”

Pegg was full of wonder. He thought:
The hand. My God. What genius. How simple and efficient.
They couldn’t have him letting go of the handle, so they cut off his hand. “With an axe,” Haden was now saying. And he offered a thin smile.

Pegg was slammed up against one side of the gurney, on this crazy journey going somewhere around a never-ending hard right turn. Somewhere else in the city, Mov’s case with his hand attached was going somewhere too. The GPS trigger had been a bit more of a challenge, Haden continued, but there was always a way with technology. “Thanks also on that score,” he said to Pegg.

“For what?”

Haden’s hand was still resting on Pegg’s forearm. Thanks, he explained, because Pegg’s tape recorder had a GPS jammer in it. It activated when Pegg played the clip of his son and blocked the transmitter in Mov’s case.

Haden hummed between the bits of information he was choosing to share.

After that, they just turned the whole system off briefly. Winked out the satellites for a few minutes and deactivated the trigger. A bit hairy. They had to let the airlines know. They had a couple wobbles up there, but things came out all right.

“Now relax,” he said. That was why Pegg had been given a muscle relaxant in the first place. Because there was going to be some pain and possible side effects later.

“Side effects like what?”

Haden said: “Cranial. Don’t worry, it’s all short-term stuff.”

“Memory,” Pegg said. “You’re saying I’m going to lose my memory.”

“Parts of it, temporarily. It’s normally bits and details, recent and older stuff. But don’t worry, it comes back.”

“I won’t forget Mov,” Pegg said. “I won’t forget who he was. Mov was from your world. One of your kind.”

Haden looked at Pegg with a sad smile. “I know. And now you know. But nobody else will ever know, and that’s for the best.”

“I could write the story,” Pegg said. “I took off my night-vision, Haden. I’m alive and my brain is fine. I can still tell the story.”

But Haden just shook his head, without saying a word. He didn’t even have to make the point that so obviously came next. Pegg could write the story, sure. He could tell the world about Mov and who he was. The source of our guilty conscience. The poison in our cultural water table. Pegg could write about how Mov cracked and went primitive, tried to induce the sacrifice by which his sins might be cleansed and peace restored.
Homo paenitentia.
Maybe even a tabloid hack could have written that story and maybe he could even have done it without his tape-recorded copy of the interview. Maybe people would have even believed him.

But not if he’d written the story once before and made it up that time. Who would believe him on the second try?

Precisely, absolutely, squarely: no one.

Pegg had to marvel at the design of his trap. Haden was very good. But now, Haden was also more seriously distracted. The ambulance had come to a standstill. And Pegg could now feel the bodies and hands pressed to the sides of the vehicle. He could hear the banging and feel the ripple of their thousandweight as they pressed against the sheet steel. Haden sat frozen, making calculations.

Pegg was slipping away, down into sleep and peace, and making his own calculations too. There was only one mistake Haden had made, and Pegg was alive to it in those fading seconds. Haden did not appreciate how central Mov remained to events unfolding. Mov would have known it. Pegg knew it without question, without even thinking. It was bone knowledge. Mov was going to become more important than
anybody could possibly imagine, because Mov—an escaped prisoner from Haden’s own world—well, because nobody was ever going to see Mov again. Nobody, ever. And the curiosity would gnaw at people. It would make them sick for answers.

 

IT WAS SIX IN THE MORNING. It was seven in the morning. It was eight in the morning. The news was spreading. And the news was mixed. The kids were safe. Nobody knew where they were being held. No press conference this time. But a deep anxiety remained. Some feeling of darkness that would not be dispelled. Suspicions grew, in crystalline complexity. You could hear the sound of them. The chatter and chew of dark ideas as they copied themselves from mind to mind.

The story about Loftin aired, but the body had been so badly beaten that he was not identified correctly at first.

“Just who was the man speaking with the riot police?” said an anchor, replaying the tape. “This is something we’re trying to find out. One other man seriously hurt. And another beaten to death under strange circumstances. Three police officers injured. Chaos in the Heights.”

The crowd in the plaza had been singing. The riot police were back.

“Who was the hostage taker?” yelled a Black Bloc protester into the nearest camera. “Why can no one simply say who the guy was?”

Behind him the bonfires had been fueled again with the contents of dumpsters and recycling bins, a steady wind stoking the plaza. And around the corner, in an action nobody seemed to have seen, no camera had recorded, the front glass of a coffee shop was smashed and the store was engulfed in flames.

“We have fires in the Heights. At least two. This is very tragic.”

The crowd was alive again, forming and re-forming. Where were the children? Nobody knew. Where was the hostage taker? Where had he been taken?

The theater stood blankly at the top of the plaza. Fluid dynamics. Tidal rips and undertows. The riot police spread across the middle of the plaza now and began their familiar cadenced approach. The crowd formed in ranks. The rocks flew. Yet everywhere you stopped to look, at the corner of your eye, in some sparser, quieter quadrant of the plaza, someone would be standing alone watching and perplexed. As if they’d gotten off at the wrong stop and didn’t recognize this part of town. In a corner of the plaza a man was playing the guitar. Another man stood nearby with a burning banner. He held it slanting out in front of him like a standard. It was dripping long nylon shreds of flame to the sidewalk. A cop raced by on a quad and didn’t stop, didn’t look, just as a rubber bullet was fired and knocked a man off the top of a media van where he had been trying to twist free the satellite dish. He fell into the path of an ambulance creeping down the side of the plaza. The ambulance crushed his foot, and he lay screaming.

“ . . . injured in what appears to have been an accident involving an ambulance. Twenty-four years of age.”

The crowd began to rock the ambulance. There were rippling waves of cheers, of calls. Some corner was turned and possibilities became certainties. The ambulance went over. The driver climbed out and scrambled up into a planter while various people set to work prying off hubcaps and kicking free the muffler. The rear doors opened and a man emerged, hands up to show he was unarmed. There seemed to be someone else in the ambulance but the crowd now surged forward again and the scene was submerged.

A press conference was canceled. The store next to the coffee shop was now burning too.

“Things are very unclear at this point. We’re being told that the theater has been cleared. The hostage taker has been arrested.” The man winced into the camera in the downwash of helicopter rotors. He
was crouched near a bus shelter, the glass smashed out. A single shot was fired behind him.

The crowd moaned.
Urrr.
And what was poised, fell. The new organism lurched again to life, this larger beast. And stones crisscrossed the air in the plaza as militia units withdrew nervously to ring the theater, to distance themselves from this civilian chaos, as the helicopter lifted from the theater roof and sped away just feet from the rooftops. Storefronts were smashed. One after another. Rocks, fires, then this. The anger was still there. Nothing had happened yet to allow it to dissipate.

The looting began at eight-thirty Saturday morning. It seemed like the end of a long formula. Wednesday plus Thursday plus Friday. At some point there was an equals sign. And as the sum of that equation, people started taking things. Then other people joined in, many of whom would have told you that they had no thought to do so previously. The idea was so contagious that a person would have had to leave the Heights to get away from it, to find safety.