The Boy in the Tunnel

by Gardner Linn

41.

It was the third thump that did it, that finally annoyed Renee enough to bring her out of Alex’s room to see just what the hell Audrey was up to. Sounded like she and Xander were fucking on the stairs, which, no way. Then again, if they were, it might be worth documenting. Renee grabbed her Polaroid and left the bedroom.

“Oh fuck, Xander.” Audrey, from around the corner, on the stairs. Maybe they really were fucking. Was she crying? Wouldn’t surprise Renee at all. Not at all. She was still traumatized, and they had barely even gotten started. Just thinking about having to go all the way with that guy made her want to throw up.

Another thump. Renee rounded the corner toward the stairs, camera at the ready. She clicked the shutter, and the stairwell turned white in the flash reflected off of the white walls and picture frames. A picture fell from the camera

“You’re taking fucking pictures Renee?” Audrey glared, panicked, over her shoulder. Renee couldn’t immediately tell what was going on. This was just ridiculous, whatever it was. There was no frame of reference, no frame at all, nothing to mediate between Renee and the image.

Renee looked away from Audrey’s red, swollen face, to the photograph on the bottom step, the gray receding into an image of Xander’s face, upside-down, eyes glassy, black saliva running toward his eyes from the corners of his mouth.

*************

“You all right back there, Dave?” Owen Bean glanced in his rearview mirror at Dave, prone on the back seat of the Taurus. A Ziploc of melting ice had been hastily taped to his hand, and pink water was now dripping on the floorboards.

“Didn’t bring a towel?” O.B. asked Taylor, the Corpus Major, riding shotgun.

“Where’m I gonna get a towel?” Taylor was a legacy at Sigma Chi, but a longstanding feud with the family of the chapter president had kept him out of the fraternity; membership in the Nine Dead Men was a grudgingly-accepted consolation prize, the social equivalent of the Jeopardy! home game. He took a sip from an oversized silver flask.

“I wish you wouldn’t drink that in the car,” said O.B. “What with Dave and everything. Suspicious, is all.”

“I wish you would shut up.” Taylor took another sip. Probably sweet tea and Jim Beam, O.B. thought, a cocktail he privately referred to as Sigma Chai.

“Can I have some?”

“No. You drive like an old Chinese lady as it is.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Old people can’t drive. Chinese people can’t drive. Women can’t drive.” Another sip. “Learn to drive better! That’s a reasonable request.”

Owen Bean didn’t know the specifics of the feud with the SX president, but he imagined that if the rest of the Hollister family was as objectionable as Taylor, there was probably a long list of grievances from which to choose. But that family had connections that went way back at UNWG, or else he wouldn’t have been Abducted, or at the very least would have been Resurrected prematurely, so strong were the feelings against him from every Dead Man except perhaps Avery, who maintained an air of pained neutrality whenever the subject came up.

Dave’s iced hand slipped off the seat and fell to the floorboard with a rattling, sloshy thunk. His lips twitched, trying to form words. “Dad,” O.B. thought he heard Dave say. “Dad basement terror. Drone.”

Taylor twisted in his seat and stared at Dave. “Did he just call me Dad?”

“I think I heard him call Avery that,” said O.B. “See if you can get his hand back on the seat. That should be elevated, probably.”

Taylor just continued to stare at Dave. “Remember at Resurrection last year when he had all those Dreamsicles and we thought he had alcohol poisoning so we tried to take him to the emergency room but I crashed his truck?”

Taylor hadn’t just crashed Dave’s truck; he had driven it straight through the window of Bailiwick’s, a scented-candle shop downtown. By the time the cops showed up, he had managed to set a good fifteen percent of the store’s inventory alight. Downtown smelled like Autumn Sunset and Cinnamon Roll for three days afterward.

Taylor poked Dave’s arm with his flask. “Hey Dave,” he said, “you want some of this?”

Spittle fell from Dave’s lips. “Secret communiqué from Cobra Island. Firefly’s services are required. The usual fee. Report to Springfield for assignment.”

“I can’t believe he remembers all this GI Joe shit,” said Taylor.

“Infiltrate and assassinate. World’s greatest saboteur. Zartan is a schizophrenic. We can exploit this.”

“Man, I remember Zartan. He was like made out of Hypercolor or something. Turned blue when you touched him.”

“Firefly! Flies!”

“Flies!”

“Tell your father to come upstairs!”

“What the fuck,” said Taylor. “Are you listening to this shit, Owen Bean?”

“Secret mission! Tell Firefly the flies have an assignment!”

“Fuck yeah! Secret mission. Secret mission, Dave!”

*****************

--Do you know what gunpowder is, Tim?

--Yeah, sure—

--No, the drug. Have you heard of it?

--No.

--It’s like cocaine, but black. When you snort it, you hallucinate that you’re talking with Anthony Delmonico.

--The first President?

--Supposedly it’s made from his ashes.

--What?

--I don’t believe it either. But whatever it’s made from, the supply is running out. And the Living Creatures need it to survive.

--What does this have to do with me?

--Nothing. Except that you were going to become one of the Nine Dead Men tonight. And the Nine are working with the Creatures for the first time in 200 years because DUH knows where to get more gunpowder.

--But wouldn’t the Nine Dead Men be happy if the Creatures disappeared?

--A game needs two players, Tim. Solitaire is for virgins and losers.

--If you’re a Dead Man, then why are you in here?

--Because I’m also a Living Creature.

--I thought they were all girls.

--Times change. Tradition isn’t what it used to be. Charlie St. James recruited me to be a double agent within the Nine. The Nine and the Creatures are working together to find more gunpowder, because they can’t take on DUH individually, but Avery has his own agenda. He doesn’t just want to find the gunpowder supply, he wants to control it. If he can do that, he can control the Living Creatures. The game needs two players, but that doesn’t mean one side can’t cheat.

******************

Patrick checked his watch. 11:53. This was getting ridiculous. He was used to the twins’ chronic lateness, but Audrey was usually there before he was. Their set was supposed to start 23 minutes ago. The crowd was getting restless. Hannah Is a Palindrome only had a 15-minute repertoire, so they had to double their time with an extended cover of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” With two fucking drum solos. Patrick couldn’t stand The Smiths, but two drum solos weren’t going to make that song any better. Pete was a fucking great drummer, as he constantly reminded the twins, but even he couldn’t pull that off. And if he couldn’t do it, then that high-school kid in HIaP most assuredly fucking couldn’t.

Hannah Is a Palindrome finally wrapped it up ten minutes ago. The crowd was ready to lynch somebody. They were beyond wanting to be entertained. It was just straight-up bloodlust now. Kurt Cobain could rise from the dead to play tonight, and they’d all just want to take turns fucking his mouth with a shotgun. The only reason Patrick didn’t just leave was that his kit was already set up onstage, and he wasn’t about to go present himself to that mob to pack it up. Best case, he’d get a PBR bottle in the head. Worst case, he didn’t even want to think about it.

Shawn, Hannah’s singer, wandered into the tiny backstage dressing room with two bottles of PBR. He handed one to Patrick. “Did you see our set?” he asked.

“Heard it. I was back here.”

“What’d you think?”

Patrick tipped back the bottle and took a long pull of the beer. What he thought was that HIaP were even worse than Audrey and the twins: dilettantes, playing at something they’d give up as soon as they graduated, if not sooner. They’d move on, and Patrick would still be here, drumming for beer with another bunch of kids too stupid to realize how terrible they were.

Shawn didn’t give him a chance to answer. “Yeah, I think we’re coming along now. Did you hear that Smiths cover? We just learned that today. I don’t know, we just got into a groove. We all just clicked.” Shawn took a slender pill bottle out of his pocket and unscrewed the top. He shook out a little of what was inside—it looked like pepper, Patrick thought—into his PBR. He swirled the beer in the bottle.

“What was that?” Like Xander, Patrick was something of a controlled-substance enthusiast. It was how he met the twins in the first place.

Shawn held up the pill bottle. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I stole this from my ex-girlfriend. It’s like cocaine mixed with LSD or something. I don’t know. But it’s insane. You see things. It’s fucked up.”

Patrick held out his hand. “You mind?”

*****************

Bass was pulsing in the tunnel somewhere to Joanie’s left. In the dark, in the confined space, the bass was a living thing, an oversized struggling heart. The walls of the tunnel shook with every sickly thump.

Joanie took a left at the next fork, toward the source of the bass. As she neared it, the bass moved around her and surrounded her, squeezing and smothering from all directions. She moved into the bass, against it. She came to a wall, a dead end. She put her hand against it. It shuddered, hot to the touch, the skin of a wounded animal pumping out its last breaths. Joanie put her ear to the wall. She could hear some of the treble now. She recognized the song: Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice.”

Joanie’s fingers found a seam on the wall. She followed it floorward and found an opening big enough for her hand—a handle. She pulled, and a panel of drywall swung out on concealed hinges. The bass was joined by the sound of sleighbells and a drunken keyboard line. A swirling red light broke the darkness. “Tanqueray and chronic, yeah I’m fucked up now.” Joanie stepped through the wall into The Party That Never Ends.

© 2006 Gardner Linn