Bad Glass

“What do you mean, they might have been working here? You don’t know where your parents were or what they were doing?”

“We lost contact. It’s hard to explain.” He looked genuinely confused. “Just … they had to be away, okay, and they couldn’t tell me—they weren’t allowed to tell me—where they were or what they were doing. But I knew—I suspected, at least—that they were here. It made sense timewise; this was right when the government started calling in all the experts. I had to stay with my grandparents in Portland for a while.”

“And you think they were in Spokane and never made it out?” Taylor asked. “You think your parents got stuck here, inside?”

Charlie shrugged, and his brow wrinkled in pain. “I don’t know. I don’t know what happened.” He paused for a moment, and then, suddenly, he got angry. He shot an intense, venomous look at Taylor. “But that’s what I’m trying to figure out, okay? They stopped calling, and I needed to know what happened. So I came here. And now I’m getting all of these emails, and, and …” He trailed off, turning his eyes toward me. I knew what he was thinking; he didn’t want to tell her about the radio, about his father’s distant voice reaching out from the static, taking orders from Devon.

Confused, Taylor looked back and forth between the two of us. Then she nodded, and after a moment, she gestured toward the front door.

There was a blinding flash of light as soon as the door closed behind us. It was a vibrant, electric blue, brilliant and seemingly without source or direction. It dazzled my eyes, and as I stood there—blind—a loud, mechanical hum filled the lobby. The air around me grew pregnant with electricity; it felt like every molecule in the room was vibrating against my skin. Something was happening inside my body; I didn’t know what, but the hair on my arms was standing up straight.

Then it stopped.

“What the fuck was that?” Floyd asked as we exchanged confused glances, our eyesight slowly returning. “Was that some type of scanner? Were we just fucking scanned?”

“Scanned?” Taylor repeated, a gruff, mocking tone to her voice. “What does that even mean, Floyd? Fucking scanned?”

“I don’t know. X-rays? MRI? Something like that?”

The thought gave me a jolt, and I shrugged out of my backpack to check on my camera. I scrolled through the last couple of images on my memory card, making sure that they hadn’t been erased by some strong magnetic field. They were still there. Pictures of the Poet’s latest work: “Above me, there is a face/Funny.” I didn’t remember taking these pictures, but they were there on the card, and they seemed completely unharmed.

When I once again raised my eyes, I found Floyd nervously downing pills from his oxycodone stash. For a moment, I felt a reflexive itch to follow his lead—I still had an almost full bottle of Vicodin in my pocket—but I suppressed the urge. I was trying to be strong here, I reminded myself. I hung my camera around my neck and shrugged into my backpack.

“Look,” Charlie said, pointing up into the corner of the room. There was a surveillance camera up there, and as I watched, it slowly swiveled my way. It paused for a moment, freezing with me in the center of its glass-eyed view, and then it continued on its circuit, turning to sweep back toward the other side of the room. “There’s still power! It’s still active!” I was surprised at the excitement in Charlie’s voice. I myself felt nothing but fear.

What’s going on here? What have we found?

“Is it some type of secret government installation?” Floyd asked, voicing my very next thought.

Charlie just shrugged. He flashed us an indecipherable smile, then turned and headed toward a door on the far side of the room.

The door opened up onto a long carpeted hallway. Charlie paused just inside the door and ran his fingers over the nearest wall. After a couple of seconds, the overhead fluorescents flickered on. The hallway was disconcertingly normal. It could have been any corridor in any office building in any city around the world—just minutes after closing time, maybe, with the workers all gone for the day. The heater kicked on as we were standing there, warm air blowing down from the overhead vents.

Charlie headed toward the nearest room, and the rest of us followed.

It was a small, windowless office, something for an assistant, maybe, or an administrator. Inside, there was nothing but a desk, a chair, a telephone, and a computer. While Charlie rummaged through the desk drawers, I picked up the telephone handset and listened to the sound of a dead line. The phone was getting power, but there was nothing on the wire, not even static. I replaced the handset just as Charlie lifted a thin sheaf of paper into the air.