Dark Screams, Volume 3 Read online

  I was reminded of those cruel old experiments you’d hear about: Cram too many rats in too little space, and they end up tearing one another apart.

  “What’s it like, growing up with that on your mind?”

  Marni sat back, looking at the summer sky, and drew her legs up and propped her elbows on her knees. I tried to think if I’d ever met anyone who seemed so relaxed in her own skin, and decided I hadn’t.

  “Kind of comforting, actually. I see the hope in it. It’s the ultimate do-over. Another chance to get it right. For me, the most interesting thing about the dinosaurs was the asteroid.”

  “That’s an awful lot of collateral damage, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, come on, Aidan,” she said with a grin. “Isn’t there a part of you that when you see something like The Road Warrior, you think, ‘I’d be one of the ones that would make it. I would riiiise to meet that challenge.’”

  “It’s the cars,” I said. “Who wouldn’t want one of those dune buggies from hell?”

  “A lot of people—I won’t say most, but a lot—when you press them, they’ll break down and admit there’s a part of them that would like to see it all wash away. So much of everything around them, they know deep down it’s all wrong. They know it’s gone off the rails and heading for a cliff anyway. They just don’t want to deal with the pain of change.”

  “Are you saying you’re any different?”

  “Me? God, no. If a voice came out of the sky and told me tomorrow’s the day it all ends, I’d be hitting the snooze alarm and asking for five more minutes. But I still can’t get past this sense of inevitability.”

  She tapped the screen of the laptop she’d been working on. I glanced at it, but there wasn’t anything to see, just code. I couldn’t parse the Matrix.

  “You know I work for a startup, but do you know what it is they do? It’s a service for parents to use GPS on their kids’ phones to keep track of them without them knowing it. It’s not just live. The data accumulates, it charts the patterns. One of the service options is how far back you want it to remember. A week, a month, a year? The deluxe plan is indefinitely.” She shook her head. “I feel like I’m contributing to a police state being imposed on kids who should have the same freedom I did to sneak around and figure out who they are, without that constant oversight. They should have the same freedom to be able to lie and get away with it. Half of what I learned about myself, I did it under the radar.” She smacked the screen, harder this time. “And this is primitive, really. I know for a fact they’re working on chip implants. A better version of what we put in dogs.”

  “Then why do it?” She was appealing on so many levels, and I couldn’t believe she wouldn’t be able to find someplace else more to her liking.

  “It’s the obvious question, I know. The pay’s good. The benefits are great. And I get to do most of it from here and dodge the office politics and dorky conversations with people of remedial social skills.”

  “Really, though,” I said. There had to be more.

  “I’m not convinced it can’t be helpful, too,” she said. “Have you ever had anyone in your life go missing? No trace, ever? Like they dropped off the face of the earth?”

  I hadn’t. The closest I’d come to something like that was news reports. You feel bad, then you move on. Because you can.

  “You have, I take it?” But it was obvious she had. It was all over her face. She really did have an expressive face.

  “I’m sure there are worse things than that,” she said. “But whatever they are, I don’t want to think them up today.”

  I felt guilty even asking: “Who?”

  “A cousin. More like a sister.” She looked at her computer screen as if she couldn’t decide whether to get back to work or shut down. “I remember my dad saying that when he was growing up, you just didn’t have to worry. You could turn them loose all day and they’d always come home. I know, things like my cousin, I know they still happened then, too. But the way he talked, my dad, it really was an aberration then. Now you just expect it.”

  I followed her gaze past the roofs around us, to the trees and the hints of taller structures peeking through, the steeples and the skyscrapers. And there was just us, no sign of another living soul in sight, and if I ignored the sounds of traffic and machines, and focused on the birds, it could be a little like lingering out of time in some well-kept garden before a fall.

  “Maybe there’s no such thing as a world that doesn’t eat its young with so much enthusiasm,” she said. “But you can dream.”

  —

  I started running with them anyway.

  Not that I was very good at it, not at first. I could barely keep up just pacing them, without yet trying the simplest of the more demanding moves, and even that was mostly gutting it out under peer pressure. Marni’s friends—Jill and Marilisa, Carlos and Drew and Jean-Paul—all seemed to have cardio for days, but she’d vouched for me and ordered them to be nice, and they were. They were patient and supportive and high-fived my progress and didn’t make me feel like too heavy of an anchor and, just once, I wished they weren’t so polite and would give me all the hazing that a struggling newbie deserves. Strange, the way feeling truly accepted into a group requires a certain level of abuse.

  Still, over the summer I got better, lighter on my feet and stronger where it mattered. I became aware of a shift in my relationship with pavement and concrete, brick and earth, with gravity itself. It was like I no longer had to touch down as hard as I did before, and my foot or hand merely had to kiss the surface for a bond to form between them, a fulcrum that launched me forward, always forward. I learned how to do a proper tuck and roll, how to spring-load my legs to rebound off a wall. My sense of balance refined and I got better at pull-ups. It changed how I looked at everything. It was all connected now, and a path ran through it…a multiplicity of paths, and all I had to do was choose.

  Check that. Choose and commit. Hesitation could mean a face-plant.

  At first Tara regarded this new hobby with detached amusement, but she couldn’t say I was trying to pull one over on her, because I’d essentially given her veto power before I’d even bought new shoes. Knock yourself out, she said, probably because she expected that was exactly what would happen.

  When it didn’t, the snark dial got turned up. Midlife crisis, ahead of schedule—this was the new diagnosis. But if I was a centenarian in the making, it would be two decades before I hit the midpoint. So there. Your logic is flawed.

  “You’re not fooling anybody,” Tara said. “You’re only doing this to impress her, and she’s not even your type, and I seriously doubt very much you’re hers.”

  “You couldn’t be reading this more wrong,” I told Tara. “It’s a group thing. We’re never even alone.”

  Could she not see it was just good to have friends again? Somehow, over the past few years, I’d stopped having actual friends. What I had were stressed-out cubicle dwellers I was expected to accomplish things with, that I sometimes saw drunk.

  “I’m doing it because it’s fun,” I said. “It feels good. You could join in, too. I wish you would. Just give it a try.”

  Someone who didn’t know Tara might not have seen the flash of fear on her face. But I did—fear of failure, maybe, of looking ungainly next to Marni and Marilisa and Jill, of quitting. Then, just as quickly, she hid it away inside some deep chamber and slammed the lid on it, and that was that. I was sorry I’d asked, but I’d had to.

  So she stayed behind and I ran without her, as June became July became August.

  The longer I kept at it, the better I got, feeling sure-footed and supercharged, but what I hadn’t expected was the change in how I related to the man-made landscapes that we ran through and over, under and around. It went beyond that early transition of seeing things in terms of pathways and approaches. It was the unfolding of a new awareness, of seeing it all as a complete environment, and we were part of it. If we’d had something to hunt, we would’ve been pre
dators. Buildings became hills and mesas and mountains, home to spirits and saturated with stories, but there was a sickness to it all, too, a desperation behind these edifices, an affront to a natural order whose inattention and mercy was the only thing that let it continue.

  Or you could just attribute all this to hallucinations born of runner’s high.

  But I had to admit I’d grown curious about what they were all doing on the days when they went heading out together but I got left behind, knowing nothing about it.

  “The free-running, that’s just the surface,” Marni finally told me one day. “Sometimes we go deep, too.”

  —

  Urban exploration—that’s the most common term for it, and I suppose the impulse behind it is what also sends people into caves, but not everyone has access to one of those, or even feels the same kind of allure.

  But in the cities, the suburbs, the struggling towns, anywhere our species has advanced and sprawled, retreated and abandoned, there’s always some vacant bit of blight to be found. That was the revelation of traveling through it at ground level, on foot, below the speeds of motors and wheels. You had no choice but to look and see, and be aware. That’s when I really started to notice them, these pockets that time and utility had passed by, and the tunnels that ran beneath the surface of the everyday.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” I asked Marni.

  “It’s not strictly legal. Sometimes, anyway. There’s a lot of breaking and entering involved.”

  That made sense. Liability. Someone’s sense of ownership of what was a cast-off relic over which they still wanted to maintain control. Even so, after months of running and jumping, stumbling and falling, they were worried I might be a narc?

  That wasn’t it, of course, and I got it, once I thought about it. Some rights have to be earned more than others. Parkour was out in the open for anyone to see. Something like this was clandestine, veering out of the sunlight and into the shadows. It wasn’t without danger, the kind that demands a certain threshold of trust.

  “I’m in,” I said.

  The first excursion I joined them on was into an old grade school left to rot after a consolidation of districts. We went before dawn, and on the drive there, Jill gave me the rundown on the code of ethics.

  “Remember just four words, and we won’t have to beat you with flashlights: No taking, no breaking.” Jill was on the muscular side of almost stocky, and with her short hair, I thought of her as our sergeant-at-arms. “Don’t steal anything. And don’t vandalize anything, except for what it takes to get inside. That includes tagging. It’s like going to a national park. Leave only footprints, take only memories.”

  “Got it.”

  “No drinking or drugs, either,” she added. “It would suck to have to haul your carcass out of someplace with a lot of stairs.”

  We timed our arrival with the break of dawn, and were the only things moving. Surrounded by a neighborhood of skinny two-story homes, the school was stern and charmless behind a wraparound barricade of chain-link fence that had already been sheared through. Jean-Paul, bearded and long-haired and the tallest of us, with the easy leverage born of lanky limbs, went first, then held it peeled back like a tent flap until we were all inside the perimeter. We crossed a slab of concrete that spread away from the building, crumbling into a million fragments and sprouting with weeds that had taken root in the cracks.

  “First childhood trying to break out of school,” said Marilisa, who was quiet and thoughtful and willowy. “Second childhood trying to break right back in.”

  Jean-Paul was a whiz with lock picks, too, and made swift work of the padlock cinching the chain wrapped through the handles on the main back doors.

  We kept our flashlights off except when absolutely necessary, and even then cupped the ends with our hands. Outside, the light came up quickly, and the way the school was laid out, nearly everything was within reach of the late summer sun, except for when we filed downstairs to the boiler room, a dungeon by another name.

  I’d gone to school in much the same kind of place, and what hit me most was how much smaller everything looked, even in abandonment. The halls looked shorter, the ceilings lower, the rooms more confining. Whenever I strayed near a window on the second floor—the ones on the ground floor were boarded over—from my perspective inside this dead hollow, the outside world looked miles and years away.

  “I’m trying to think of something I learned at mine that I couldn’t have gotten from home schooling,” Marilisa said. “Sorry, kids, but I’m drawing a big fat blank.”

  “Oh, I picked up plenty,” Marni said. “How to be cliquish. How to be cruel. How to suck it up and make like the whacks don’t hurt. Lots of good real-world stuff.”

  Most of the time, Carlos and Drew kept busy with a clipboard that held sheets of graph paper, mapping the layout of the place. Carlos, a compact guy who could do headstand push-ups with a full range of motion, had a surprisingly delicate hand, and no shortage of patience whenever the jittery Drew hovered over his shoulder to tell him this line or that was half a square off.

  “Habit,” Carlos said, verging on apology, when he saw me watching. “There’s no point to it, this isn’t one we’ll be coming back to.”

  Drew was the kind of guy who wore a stocking cap year-round, and now looked aggrieved. “The map is the point.”

  “You guys map everywhere?”

  “Sure. Sometimes you have to,” Carlos said. “Some places are so big, you can’t come close to seeing everything in one trip.”

  “But it’s good just to have them,” Drew said. “It’s a record. We came, we saw…”

  “We got all anal-retentive and shit,” Carlos finished, then they fist-bumped.

  We prowled for an uneventful morning before slipping away. It was simple and undemanding, something light to introduce me to the routine.

  The next ones were when things started to get interesting. We found our way into a quick succession of dead places. A shoe factory that had gone motionless years ago. A mansion left in disrepair after some family’s good fortune had turned around. A nursing home that still radiated a sense of despair so thick we didn’t even want to stay. A church whose empty pews sat facing a deserted altar, full of ghost parishioners awaiting a phantom priest, with the page numbers of the last hymns ever sung still on the board up front.

  They were all different in function and form, but there were also common denominators. Even in late summer they retained a damp chill. They had their own hollow sound, unlike buildings for the living, an empty hush broken by the crunch of our boots on grit, but that otherwise soaked up an inordinate amount of what little noise we did make, as if age had softened all but the hardest materials—crumbling plaster, spongy wood, rotting fabric, all of it sifted with a coating of dust. Higher rooms became aviaries, floors pocked white with droppings and strewn with feathers and sometimes the desiccated husks of dead birds.

  But nothing, I soon realized, ever gets abandoned in quite the same way as anything else. There’s always something unique left behind, fixtures or furnishings or broken-down machinery from another era, sometimes in chaos and sometimes as orderly as if the place were expecting its old inhabitants back any moment. Most poignant to me were the files, brittle and yellowed, records that had been people’s jobs, sometimes summaries of entire lives, but which now meant nothing.

  Everywhere, it seemed, walls had become canvasses for would-be artists who’d preceded us with a different set of ethics. Most of it was the usual graffiti by taggers with no more ambition than big, bold renditions of their names. I started to hate them, deeply and irrationally, for never learning that actual work was supposed to come first, signature last. I hated them for being content to affix their names to other people’s failures. Although McLuhan would’ve understood, at least—even here, the medium was the message.

  Stirred into all that, almost unnoticed, were other designs, cruder and more enigmatic, even primitive, impossible to figure out. I spo
tted the same ragged, counterclockwise spiral with a hook-like projection at the end in three separate locations. Twice, the same series of overlapping squares, each straight edge tapering from top to bottom, and right to left, like a spike. Often they didn’t even look like paint, and I imagined they’d grown there, a colony of intelligent fungus sprouting in just two dimensions. They invited you to stare, and mocked your efforts to find meaning.

  “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” I told Marni one late-September Saturday. “It’s like I want to look, I want to see, but I don’t feel good about it.”

  “It can be like that,” she said, “coming to terms with staring into the abyss.”

  We’d spent the day exploring the ruins of the Barnstormer Brewery, a regional brand that had gone defunct a decade before. It was actually a complex of buildings, a long-term project if we wanted to see it all.

  “I don’t know if the rest of them get that,” Marni said. “I honestly don’t.”

  “Get what, exactly?”

  “That it’s all going to look like this someday.”

  As often happened, our team split up, and Marni and I found ourselves alone on the cavernous fifth floor of the main brewhouse, sitting with our legs dangling over the side of a catwalk. We faced the jagged remains of a bank of frosted windows that overlooked the warehouse district and the city center beyond. Dusk was coming on, the sky a gradient of ruddy orange to deep blue, and for now it felt like we were the only people left on earth.

  She might’ve even liked this.

  “Every place you’ve ever lived,” Marni went on. “Every place you’ve ever worked. Every place you’ve ever passed on a thousand-mile trip. It’s all going to look like this. Either a piece at a time, or all at once.” She picked up a stray chunk of bottle glass and held it between her eye and the setting sun, then, unenamored with what it did to the light, dropped it with a clink. “My money’s on all at once.”