Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
No more Ouija boards, ever again, I decided during the trip home.
I didn’t feel particularly bad for Elsabeth Brünner—she’d made her choices—but I’d sensed her fear and desperation in those final moments.
The Thing had found her just like it had found the oracles from Analysis and Logistics.
More worryingly, she’d said it was everywhere.
I actually looked around the subway car as if I might find it standing there, holding on to an overhead rail while it decided which commuters it was going to devour next.
I didn’t see it, thankfully, but as I scanned the train I noticed belatedly that things were a little…
off. Those seated around me huddled in on themselves, shoulders hunched as if waiting for a blow to fall.
Even the guy who normally harangued us with Bible passages was subdued, mumbling to himself at the far end of the car.
The mood was tense, even fearful. People were starting to wonder if they would make it home or disappear somewhere along the way.
A few people groaned or sighed, but mostly we all stared at our phones and waited.
Every news site I checked was running stories about the disappearances in the city, most featuring so-called experts with theories that ranged from an insidious act of terrorism to a widespread hoax perpetrated either by woke libs or fascist right-wingers.
The NYPD was being cagey about the number of people who had vanished, but media outlets were estimating it as somewhere north of five thousand, pointing to the avalanche of anecdotes and blurry videos overwhelming social media.
There were protests at City Hall and reports of gridlock paralyzing every route out of the city.
Is this what it feels like to be powerful?
I wondered as I scrolled through yet another news story.
I’d set into motion a chain of events that was affecting millions of people—examined in a certain light, that was pretty badass.
All things being equal, however, I would have preferred to get my promotion without becoming responsible for the likely deaths of several thousand New Yorkers.
I needed to stop this, and soon, before there was no one left to give me another promotion.
We sat there, unmoving, for almost forty-five minutes, punctuated by occasional monotone announcements from the driver thanking us for our continued patience.
Then someone said, “I can see lights out in the tunnel,” and we all turned to peer through the windows.
Sure enough, bright, bluish-white beams bounced and skittered along the walls and ground as people holding flashlights approached.
We heard someone calling loudly from farther up the tunnel, and then the doors to our carriage were pulled open, allowing warm, stale air to flow inside. “Everyone out!” a man’s voice shouted.
Confused and uneasy, we gathered up our things and filed obediently to the open door.
Two burly men dressed in military camouflage helped us down to the rock-strewn ground where other military personnel waited, all of them armed with automatic rifles, the light from their headlamps blinding when it swept over us.
Barking orders, they gathered us in a long line against the tunnel wall, away from the tracks, and marched us through the hot, fetid darkness back the way we’d come, to 103rd Street station.
That was how we learned that the governor had mobilized the National Guard.
I discovered later that the train in front of us had braked automatically when the dead man’s switch was tripped, presumably when the driver disappeared along with everyone else on board.
MTA workers found the train empty except for the belongings left by its former occupants.
Security footage showed the driver in her cab one moment and then gone the next, the two separated only by an infinitesimal distortion in the recording.
It took a long time for me to make it home, and I was disquieted and exhausted in equal measure when I finally closed the apartment door behind me.
Amira was sitting on the sofa, looking down at her phone while local news played on the TV.
It took her a few moments to notice me, and when she did, her smile was clearly forced.
Deciding not to regale her with my tale of commuting woe, I sank down next to her. “What’s wrong?”
She frowned a little. “I’m not sure. It looks like Dr. Cheng is missing.” That was Amira’s graduate advisor, the woman supervising her PhD and the primary reason Amira had decided to pursue a career in physics. She idolized her.
My heart sank. “Are you sure?”
“She didn’t show up for our seminar this afternoon. No one can get a hold of her.” Amira glanced down at her phone again. “She isn’t answering my texts.”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” I told her, though in fact I wasn’t sure at all.
“Maybe her phone isn’t working.” On the TV, people screamed and chanted outside City Hall, waving signs that read Tell the Truth!
and SAVE US. A cordon of police shoved protesters back while the mayor addressed the crowd from a podium in front of the columned portico, striving for calm but not quite getting there.
Slowly leaning into me, Amira stared at the TV as well. “I’m scared,” she said quietly.
All I could do was put my arm around her shoulders and squeeze.
Eventually, I retreated to my bedroom and called Eric. I expected to get his voicemail again, so I was surprised when he answered on the second ring.
“Hey you,” he said quietly.
“Hi.”
Silence descended between us. I felt awkward, unsure.
“Are you okay?” he finally asked.
“Not really.”
“Yeah. Me neither. Are you following the news?”
“A little.” I paused. “What’s kept you so busy lately?”
He didn’t reply for a long time. Finally, he exhaled and said, “Family drama. I can’t really get into it, though.”
I fought to keep the hurt from my voice. “Oh. Okay.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to tell you. It’s just…complicated.”
“Sure. I understand.”
“My offer still stands. I can get us out of the city. You, me, and Amira.”
For a moment, I was tempted. I could walk away from what I’d started and let someone else deal with it.
I imagined the three of us—and Lex, if they were still talking to me—sitting on a tropical beach, drinking mai tais while warm ocean waves lapped at our feet.
Then we could start over somewhere that wasn’t slowly dying.
Eric could open his Korean bakery, Amira could finish her PhD at another school, and Lex…
well, they would probably run to the nearest branch office of Dark Enterprises and bury themself in weird books.
And me? I’d never have the power I wanted so badly. Instead, I’d spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, waiting for Management to find me. Or, worse, watching as that Thing devoured the world until it came for me last of all.
“I don’t think it’s that easy,” I said at last, my voice quiet.
“No,” Eric agreed after a long pause, “I don’t suppose it is.”
Impulsively, I asked him, “You would tell me if something was wrong, wouldn’t you? Something I should know about?”
He took a little too long to respond. “Sure,” he said. “Of course.”
I knew he was lying, but I kept my tone upbeat even as my heart twisted painfully in my chest. “Good.”
“Let’s start checking in more often, okay? I want to know that you’re safe.”
“Okay.”
I hung up, feeling utterly and entirely alone.
Amira was frightened, Lex was angry with me, and Eric was lying.
I had no one to talk to, no one to confide in.
And to top it off, everything I’d ever wanted depended on me accomplishing an impossible task.
Despair beckoned. Maybe I should just sit back and accept my fate.
Whether Ms. Crenshaw fired me, Management obliterated me, or the Thing devoured me, the result was the same.
I was so tired of striving and struggling for whatever crumbs life threw my way. Wouldn’t it be better to stop trying?
I almost—almost—gave in. But then I remembered that I’d escaped my cubicle in Human Resources, though I’d long despaired of that ever happening.
I remembered how good it had felt to shove Andrea and Gerald into the Stygian Maw, the thrill of watching Mr. Samuels sacrifice to the Old Ones, Ms. Price promising that Dark Enterprises would give me whatever I wanted.
I wasn’t ready to give up. Not yet. I’d learned that the Thing was an Abomination, whatever that meant.
I was closer to answers now than I had been before.
I would keep striving, even if I had to do it alone, because people like me had to make their own success.
To heck with everyone else. I was going to save the world, and then take from it everything I’d ever wanted.
Sending in the National Guard was a tipping point in the crisis engulfing New York.
The disappearances became national news overnight, accelerated on social media by trending hashtags like #Raptured and #VanishedNYC.
My phone blared with emergency broadcast alerts several times during the night, announcing the institution of a citywide curfew lasting until sunrise and ordering people off the streets.
As a result, I was bleary-eyed and poorly rested as I got ready for work the next morning.
“You can’t stay home?” Amira asked from where she sat at the dining table, looking as tired as I felt. Her phone buzzed in her hand—it would be her parents, calling for the fourth time in the past hour, begging her to leave the city before it was too late.
I shook my head as I pulled on my cardigan. “No. But I’ll be fine. Text me every half hour, okay?” Kissing her on the cheek, I hurried out.