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He tumbled forward, spray of blood droplets arcing through the air as he fell face-first onto the floor. I moved toward him, thought about putting a second and third and fourth round into his brain. Just then I felt something rigid and square in a jacket pocket that had been empty one minute ago. My cell phone back again? I reached in and pulled out something with a black tape-wrapped handle. I flicked a switch and a little nicked blade popped out the end. A dull utility razor. Strange. I stuffed it back in, thinking I might need it later.

I turned to face Krissy-

POP! POPBZZZZZZPOP POP POP!

In the darkness of the mall, a flare of light filled my vision. A crackling sound, like popcorn. Every muscle in my body first clenched, then went slack. The tiled floor came up and smacked me in the face.

I laid there with the surface pressed against my cheek, a bug’s-eye view of the world. I was completely unable to move, brains scrambled for a confused few seconds.

Looks like Krissy needs new shoes. Hey, look! A smashed cigarette butt!

I felt the gun twist out of my fingers. With a huge effort I turned my head enough to look up and see Krissy holding the gun on me, then inspecting John. He shifted and moved, sitting up. He took off his flannel shirt and pressed it against a wet wound on his scalp that was matting his hair with blood.

She helped him to his feet and they towered over me. Krissy had the tazer in her hand.

John rolled me over, Krissy covering me with the Smith. I strained to move a limb. Random muscles started to flex under my command again, but I couldn’t organize them. It was like those first stumbling moments out of bed on a groggy morning.

John, bloody rag pressed to his skull, looked me right in the eye.

“David, if you’re still you at all, you know why I’m doing this. Are you in there?”

I met his gaze. I tried to talk, tested a few words to get my lips moving. When I was coherent I said, “John, I understand, and I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me just now. Really. But I’m thinkin’ clear now. It’s me. Don’t let her shoot me, okay?”

He studied my face, didn’t seem convinced. I saw with growing horror the situation I had gotten myself into. I had been acting like a fool. I clearly should have killed him earlier.

“John,” I said, eyes pleading. “Please.”

All I needed was for him to turn his back. I had the utility knife. Just hide it in my hand and, with a quick and decisive move, I could slit his throat. Use him as a shield, get the gun away from the girl. After that, the girl would be easy. She’d do whatever I wanted under the barrel of a gun. Everything would be fine.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he took Krissy aside. They whispered to each other while she kept the gun on me, the barrel tipping up and down in her delicate hand.

I tried to move my legs. I could feel them but couldn’t make them obey me. The muscles felt like they were asleep. I ground my teeth together so hard I felt like they would shatter.

Gotta stay cool. They talked, the girl doing all the talking now, the bitch trying to convince John to do something. He finally agreed, and came back to face me.

“Dave, here’s what I think. I think the thing that was in Wexler was in you. Maybe it still is and maybe it isn’t. No, just lay still. Now we’re gonna do something here. Krissy’s gonna give me the gun and I’m gonna put it on you, it’s nothin’ personal. And on top of that, she’s gonna press the zappy thing against your skin while she does this. So do not move. You know I won’t kill ya, Dave, but you say you understand, so understand this. You jump or grab for her or anything, she’ll zap you and I’ll shoot you in the thigh. Then I’ll come over there and kick you in the crotch repeatedly.”

I showed no emotion, just nodded.

Get the arms moving, get them moving now. You get the tazer away from the girl and immobilize John with it. Move move move...

Krissy handed the pistol to John. She came around me, pressed the tazer against my shoulder with her left hand.

With her right, she reached around her neck and took off her gold necklace, the one with the dangling cross. Nothing making sense now.

She dropped the necklace over my head and my stomach clenched, suddenly more scared of the necklace than the gun for some reason.

It’s poison. They’ve coated it with some kind of toxin that can seep through my skin like a nicotine patch, into my blood stream, eating through my lungs and liver like acid...

I thrashed away from her and got my hands up, but my coordination was still screwed from the tazer shot and I fought like a toddler. She got me into a clumsy headlock and put the chain around me. Almost immediately my body began to convulse, organs thrashing around inside me like they were making a jailbreak from my gut, making that tazer hit feel like a hiccup in comparison. I went back to the floor, hard. I felt hands on my right arm. Soft hands. The girl.

And immediately it was over. The seizure, or whatever the hell it was, stopped. I was suddenly very tired and off-center, like I had just stirred from a long nap on a stranger’s couch. My mind didn’t clear. It had been clear before. Instead it muddled, suddenly ablaze with rioting factions of insecurities and dreams, a cacophonous battleground of conflicting moral codes and dogma. I was, therefore, back to normal.

I sat up and saw the girl stumbling as if she had been cracked over the head with a pipe, dazed, out on her feet. She bent down at the waist, breathing hard. She vomited massively on the floor.

I felt like doing the same. I had this greasy feeling like I was rid of something unclean, like I had just passed a tapeworm. And there was this lingering, sick shame, the feel of a man who sobers up just enough to realize he’s been making out with his best friend’s mother.

John stared at Krissy, terrified. He turned on me, questioning, suspicious.

“What are you looking at me for?” I shouted. “Go help her, you ass!”

John nodded, apparently convinced that I was fine. Krissy was not fine. Krissy was screaming. She went to her knees, then thrashed onto her back. I scrambled to my feet, moved toward her. John grabbed my jacket, holding me back.

“No!” I screamed. “It’s in her! The thing is in her! Let me touch her, let it pass back into me and then shoot me in the temple.”

“Not today.”

“It’s killing her!”

“No. It’s not. She’s killing it.”

“What?”

I turned to her. Krissy looked up at us with eyes that had turned bloodshot pink, sweat-soaked hair hanging down in strands. There was a deep, black hatred in that stare so profound that it was like a punch in the gut. I had never seen anything approaching that look on a human face before. The intelligence behind it was so hateful it was alien, unfeeling, unreasoning, infinitely terrible.

I serve none but Korrok.

I suddenly had the strange urge to bury myself in a deep hole somewhere, away from all this. I wanted to curl up into a fetal position and start sucking my thumb, let my tears and dripping saliva pool under me.

Sorry. I tried living, tried being sentient. Can’t do it. Can’t live in the same universe with that.

She screamed again, loud. Opera-singer loud. Impossibly loud. She clutched at her hair and pressed her eyes closed. A sound erupted in the air around us, a long roar like an ocean wave crashing against a dock. Flecks of glass smacked me in the cheek. I looked up and realized the sound was a hundred panes of glass skylight exploding at once, a circular wave of bursting glass spreading overhead like a ripple in a pond, the sound finally petering out into a high-pitched ringing of glass raining down onto the floor around us. Glass pelted our shoulders and rained into our hair.

Silence. She laid still.

Whoa. She’s dead. No... chest moving. Breathing.

Krissy opened her eyes, ran her hand over her face. She looked at us. We stared for a long time, John and I exchanging glances, not sure what to do.

She sat up, looked exhausted.

I took the necklace from around my neck and handed it to her. She took it without hesitation, put it on. I was still looking at her when I said to John, “I don’t get it.”

“She broke it,” he said. “Like a fever, like an infection. It passed from you into her, but it couldn’t live in her.” He turned his attention to the girl. “How do you feel?”

“Tired.”

Krissy went over to Wexler, examined him and said he was alive, though I could see no sign of it. John ran out to Krissy’s car to call an ambulance on her cell phone.

As the first sirens faded in from the distance, Wexler climbed into consciousness long enough to smile at Krissy, brush a strand of hair out of her face with his fingers. She kissed his forehead. He whispered something to her, a question, something I couldn’t hear. His eyes slipped closed again.

There wasn’t much for us to do except wait. My bullet had creased John’s scalp and he said he was okay but, damn, did it bleed a lot. The wad of shirt he held against it was soaked. We wandered around aimlessly for a bit, then John noticed the shine of a golden object on the ground at his feet. The number “1” key.

John eyed me and said, “Oh, we gots to see what that opens.”

We left Krissy in the desolate food court, our shoes crunching through broken glass. We met two paramedics near the entrance and pointed them back to where Krissy waited with Wexler.

You’d have thought the “1” door would be right next to the “2” door, preferably to the left of it. You’d be wrong, though, because after half an hour of walking around the mall we found another of those roll-down gates, this one blocking the way to another high-ceiling space that was apparently going to be a department store.

We unlocked the gate and stepped through and stopped in our tracks. John let out a long breath and said, “Shiiiiiiiiit.”

There was a painting on one wall. On the wall, on the ceiling, on the floor, on the stacks of 2x4’s laying next to the wall. I recognized the style. I had seen one similar in the fake Jamaican’s trailer.

The painting was abstract, yet strangely realistic. It was a three-dimensional picture of a ring intersecting another ring in a way that seemed to shift as you looked at it. Like the landscape I saw in Robert Marley’s bedroom it seemed to draw you in, to take on complexity as you stared.

It’s a picture of time.

I intentionally turned my back to it and said to John, “I think your Jamaican friend was here.”

John walked toward the mural, said, “I think he was living here.”

Not far from the painting was a nest made up of an ancient sleeping bag and about half a dozen plastic milk crates. The floor looked like the aftermath of a bloody battle between empty Captain Morgan bottles and candy bar wrappers.

John said, “What is it with this place?”

“I don’t know.”

John studied the painting, eyes glazing over. He blinked, turned away and said, “Let’s never come back here.”

“Okay.”

We went out the way we came, dropping the gate behind us and locking it again. We met Krissy on the way.

“What are you guys doing?”

I said, “We’re looking the place over. We’re thinking of buying it.”

She ignored me and said to John, “Are you going to get that looked at?”

“Nah, it’s just a cut. I was gonna shave my head anyway. Are you gonna go see Danny in the hospital?”

“Yeah. But... there’s something I’m supposed to do first. He asked me if I had watched the tape. Do you know what that’s about?”

I said “no” and John said “yes” simultaneously.

“The video he was shooting,” John said. “In his apartment.”

* * * * *

A half hour later, Krissy sat down on the couch in Wexler’s apartment while John rewound the tape and let it play. Wexler, looking tired and beaten, appeared on the screen as before.

“Hi, honey,” he said. “Are you there? Answer me if you’re there.”

Krissy looked at us, confused. We had no answers. We were too tired. She turned her eyes back to the screen, waiting.

“Come on. It’s okay,” Wexler said, staring into the camera in silence for a few seconds. “Just say hello.”

“Um, hello,” said Krissy, looking embarrassed to be doing it. A tear ran down her cheek. “Danny. You look awful...”

“I know. It’s been a rough couple of weeks,” said Danny, the man replying to the camera a full three hours before Krissy made that comment. “Baby, I’ve done somethin’ really stupid. I’ve gotten wrapped up in something... something you can’t imagine.”

“What?” Krissy said, sobbing. “What did you get into?”

“If I told you the details, you would wish I hadn’t,” he said. “But, you know by now that I’m not myself. I come and go, and right now I’m fine, but I have to fight for every second of control. It’s draining. Baby, it takes so much energy to keep myself on top, on the surface, at the wheel. As soon as I relax, he’ll take over. It will take over. And I’ll just be a spectator. Helpless.”

He broke down into sobs. So did Krissy, sounding utterly drained.

“Are you okay? Were you hurt in all of this?” He asked, through hitching breaths.

“I’m fine. I’ll be fine. This is so strange.”

“I don’t even know how I’m doing it, any of this,” Wexler continued. “Right now. I see things, I hear things across time and space and, it’s better if you can put it out of your head, Kris. It’s better to live the rest of your life believing things like this aren’t possible. But there’s other things I need to tell you. Things I’ve been wanting to say for a long time. And if I’m still alive, I probably won’t have the courage to say them in person.”

Wexler’s eyes shifted slightly and a chill ran down my spine as I realized the man in the recording was looking right at me. I shifted to my left a couple of feet, and his eyes followed me. He said, “Guys, thank you for your help. But Kris and I need to have a private conversation, okay?”

Wexler stared at me in dead silence until we walked out the door. As soon as it was closed behind me, I could faintly hear Wexler and Krissy continue their talk. We never saw either of them again, having gone our separate ways as people do. She did show up in one of my dreams a few weeks later. She was a mermaid and I was, as usual, a pirate. Anyway.

“Almost morning,” said John in the hallway. “You remember where you parked?”

“Under about four feet of water.”

“Oh. Right.”

“It’s only about four blocks from here anyway.”

“Your car? It’s further than that...”

“No,” I said, glancing at his blood-matted hair. “The hospital. We gotta think up a story to explain why you made me shoot you.”

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Copyright © 2008 David Wong and Jason Pargin - All rights reserved. No part of this book or website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the express written consent of the author and publisher. This online book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidence.