Sleepless. Part 1

Sleepless.

by CHARLIE HUSTON.

Chapter 1.

PARK WATCHED THE HOMELESS MAN WEAVE IN AND OUT OF the gridlocked midnight traffic on La Cienega, his eyes fixed on the bright orange AM/FM receiver dangling from the man's neck on a black nylon lanyard. The same shade orange the SL response teams wore when they cleared a house. He closed his eyes, remembering the time an SLRT showed up on his street at the brown and green house three doors down. The sound of the saw coming from the garage, the pitch rising when it hit bone.

Techno-accented static opened his eyes. The homeless man was next to his window, dancing from foot to foot, neck held at an unmistakable stiff angle, flas.h.i.+ng a hand-lettered sign on a square of smudged whiteboard: BLESSINGS!!!.

Park looked at the man's neck.

The people in the cars around him had noticed it as well; several rolled up their windows despite the ban on air-conditioning.

Park opened his ashtray, scooped out a handful of change, and was offering it to the wild-eyed sleepless when the human bomb detonated several blocks away and the explosion thrummed the gla.s.s of his winds.h.i.+eld, ruffling the hairs on his arms with a rush of air hotter than the night.

He flinched, the change falling from his hand, scattering on the asphalt, the tinkle of it hitting and rolling in every direction, lost in the echoes bouncing off the faces of the buildings lining the avenue, the alarms set off when windows were shattered and parked cars blown onto their sides.

By the time the coins had stopped rolling and the homeless man had gotten down on his hands and knees to scrabble for his scattered handout, Park was reaching under his seat for his weapon.

The Walther PPS was in a holster held to the bottom of the driver's seat by a large patch of Velcro. Clean, oiled, and loaded, with the chamber empty. He didn't need to check, having done so before he left the house. He took it from its holster and dropped it in the side pocket of his cargo pants. It was unlikely any of his customers would be this far west, but it would be typical of the universe to send one just now to see him with a sidearm clipped to his waist.

Climbing from the car, he closed and locked the door, secure in the knowledge that the traffic jam would not be breaking up before sunrise. He was working his way through the cars, all but a very few of them sealed tight now, their occupants rigid and sweating inside, when the street was plunged into sudden darkness.

He stopped, touched his weapon to be sure of it, and thought about Rose and the baby, asking the frozen world to keep them safe if he should die here. But the darkness didn't invite any new attacks. Or if it did, they were yet to come. More likely it was an unscheduled rolling blackout.

He edged between the cars, watching a man in a sweat-twisted suit pounding the horn of his newly scarred Audi, raising similar protests from the cars around his. Or perhaps they were intended to drown out the screams coming from the flaming crater at the intersection.

Those flames were the brightest illumination on the street now, almost all the drivers having turned off their engines and headlights to conserve gas. He could feel them on his face already, the flames, baking the skin tight. And he remembered the cabin in Big Sur where he took Rose after they first knew about the baby, but before the diagnosis.

There had been a fireplace. And they'd sat before it until nearly dawn, using what had been meant as a weekend's supply of wood on their first night.

His face had felt like this then.

He tried to recall the name of the cabin they had stayed in. Bluebird? Bluebell? Blue Ridge? Blue something for sure, but blue what?

Blue Moon.

The name painted just above the door had been Blue Moon. With a little star-accented teal crescent that Rose had rolled her eyes at.

Are we supposed to think we're in f.u.c.king Connecticut, for Christ's sake?

He'd said something in response, some joke about not cursing in front of the baby, but before he could remember what it was he'd said, his foot slipped in a great deal of someone's blood, drawing him back to the present, and the flames here before him.

The wiper blades on a Hummer H3, one of the few vehicles with intact gla.s.s this close to the blast, were beating furiously, cleaner fluid spraying, smearing blood, batting what looked like a gnarled bit of scalp and ear back and forth across the winds.h.i.+eld, while the young woman inside wiped vomit from her chin and screamed into a Bluetooth headset.

Looking at a man on the edge of the crater, his entire jawbone carried away by a piece of flying debris, Park only wondered now at the instinct that had made him take his weapon from the car rather than his first-aid kit.

IT WASN'T THE FIRST human bomb in Los Angeles. Just the first one north of Exposition and west of the I-5.

The sound of the detonation rolling across the L.A. basin and was.h.i.+ng up against the hills had brought me out to my deck. One expects the occasional crack of gunfire coming from Hollywood on any given night, but the crump of high explosives in West Hollywood was a novelty. A sound inclined to make me ruminant, recalling, as it did, a pack of C-4 wired to the ignition of a VC colonel's black Citroen in Hanoi, as well as other moments of my youth.

Thus nostalgic, I came onto the deck in time to see a slab of the city, framed by Santa Monica, Venice, Western, and Sepulveda, wink into blackness. Looking immediately skyward, knowing from experience that my eyes would subtly adjust to the reduction in ground light, I watched the emergence of seldom seen constellations.

Under these usually veiled stars, the city burned.

Only a small bit of it, yes, but one of the more expensive bits. A circ.u.mstance that would no doubt have serious repercussions.

It's all well and good in the general course of things if Mad Swan Bloods and Eight Trey Gangster Crips want to plant claymore mines in Manchester Park, or for Avenues and Cyprus Park to start launching RPGs across Eagle Rock Boulevard, but suicide bombers less than a mile from the Beverly Center would not be tolerated.

Uncorking a second bottle of Clos des Papes 2005, I rested secure in the knowledge that the National Guard would be shock-trooping South Central and East L.A. at first light.

Nothing like a show of force to keep up the morale of the general citizenry in times of duress. The fact that the display would be utterly misdirected and only serve to brew greater discontent was beside the point. We had long pa.s.sed the stage where the consequences of tactical armed response were weighed in advance. Anyone with the time and wherewithal to put a map on a wall and stick pins in it could see quite clearly what was happening.

I had such a map, and said wherewithal, and many pins.

If red pins are acts of violence committed by people traditionally profiled as potentially criminal perpetrated against those who have not been so profiled, and yellow pins are acts of violence perpetrated between peoples traditionally so profiled, and blue pins indicate acts of violence carried out by uniformed and/or badged members of the soldiering and law enforcement professions upon peoples so profiled, one can clearly see patterns of tightly cl.u.s.tered yellow pins, encircled by blue pins, concentrated to the far south, east, and north of the most prime Los Angeles real estate, which is, in turn, becoming pockmarked by random bursts of red pins.

It is, on such a map, the vastness of the territory devoted to yellow-on-yellow acts of violence and blue responses in relative proportion to the wee acreage dotted with red, that should give one pause.

It looked, upon little or no reflection, like the pustules of a disease spreading inexorably against the feeble resistance of a failed vaccine, carrying infection along the arteries of the city, advancing no matter how many times the medics raised the point of amputation up the ravaged limb.

That it was a symptom of a disease rather than the disease itself was an irony I never chuckled at. There being little or no humor to be found in the prospect of the end of the world.

But I did appreciate it. The irony, and the fact that the disease that was killing us ignored the cla.s.sifications and borders that defined so clearly for so many who they should be killing and why.

The disease didn't care for distinctions of cla.s.s, race, income, religion, s.e.x, or age. The disease seemed only to care that your eyes remain open to witness it all. That what nightmares you had haunted only your waking hours. The disease considered us all equal and wished that we share the same fate. That we should bear witness as we chewed our own intestines, snapping at what gnawed from the inside.

It wished that we become sleepless.

I could sleep.

Choosing, that night, not to.

Choosing, instead, to pour another gla.s.s of overrated but still quite good Rhone into an admittedly inappropriate jelly jar, and to settle into an overdesigned Swedish sling chair to watch that small, expensive fragment of the city burn.

Herald, I knew, of worse.

7/7/10.

TODAY BEENIE SAID something about Hydo knowing "the guy." What's encouraging about this is that I didn't ask. Hydo called for a delivery and I went over to the farm to make the drop (100 15-mg Dexedrine spansules). He asked if I wanted a c.o.ke and I hung around long enough to scroll through my texts and map my next couple deliveries. Beenie was there, making a deal to sell some gold he'd farmed, but mostly just hanging out with the guys. Hydo pa.s.sed around the dex to his guys and they all started speed rapping while they hacked up zombies and stuff. One of them (I think his name is Zhou, but I need to check my notes) started talking about his cousin going sleepless. The other guys all started telling their own sleepless stories. Beenie asked if I knew anyone. I said yes. They all talked some more, and the one guy (Zhou?) said he put an ad on Craigslist to trade a level 100 Necromantic Warlord for Dreamer to give his cousin, but the only response he got was from a scammer. That's when Beenie looked at Hydo and said, "Hydo, man, what about the guy?" Hydo was in the middle of an exchange in Chasm Tide. His front character was on his monitor in the Purple Grotto, getting ready to pa.s.s off the gold to a Darkling h.e.l.ler as soon as one of the guys confirmed that the PayPal transfer had come through. But everyone stopped talking right after Beenie spoke. Just Hydo talking to the Darkling on his headset, telling him he'd throw in a Mace of Chaos for another twenty euro. He was acting like he hadn't heard what Beenie said. But he gave him a look. And Beenie started shutting down his MacBook and said he had to roll. I pocketed my phone and finished my c.o.ke and said later.

Beenie was my first in with the farms. I met him at a party on Hillhurst. He knows a lot of people. They like him. If he says Hydo knows "the guy," it might be true.

In any case, I didn't say anything. I just walked out of the farm behind Beenie. We talked while he was unlocking his Trek and putting on his helmet and elbow and knee pads. He said he was looking for some opium. He has this thing for old Hollywood and read somewhere that Errol Flynn described smoking opium, "like having your soul ma.s.saged with mink gloves." Now he wants to try it. I told him I'd see what I could do. Then he pedaled north on Aviation, probably headed for Randy's Donuts.

I made a note to ask around about opium. Made another note to look over my list of Hydo's known a.s.sociates.

Finished deliveries.

A suicide bomber on the way home.

I did what I could. Not much. I think I stopped a boy's bleeding long enough for him to get to the hospital. Who knows what happened to him there. Traffic got messed up for miles. Once the EMTs and paramedics showed up, I spent most of my time pa.s.sing out water. A lady thanked me when I saw her fainting in her car and got her a bottle. A witness said the bomber was a woman, a New America Jesus insurgent. He said he knew she was a NAJi because she screamed "something about Satan" before she blew herself up. He also said she was staggering like she was drunk. NAJis don't drink. A Guard told me that looking at the size of the crater she left, she was probably staggering under the weight of the bomb. He said that kind of blast was what they got in Iraq from car bombs. I said something about how at least he wasn't there anymore, and he asked me if I was "f.u.c.king joking." Almost noon before I got home.

Francine had to leave Rose alone with the baby.

She was in the backyard with her laptop. There was gardening stuff lying around, but she was logged into her Chasm Tide account, playing her elemental mage, Cipher Blue, trying again to get through the Clockwork Labyrinth on her own.

The baby was on a blanket next to her, under an umbrella, crying. As I came up, Blue was being dismembered by a skeleton made of bra.s.s gears, wire, and rusting springs. Beenie says no one gets through the Labyrinth on their own. You have to join a campaign, but Rose refuses to try it that way. Which isn't surprising.

She closed the laptop and grabbed a garden trowel and started stabbing the dry earth, digging at the roots of one of the weeds that's taken over the garden. I picked up the baby and asked how she had been and Rose told me she had just started crying again right before I came home. Said she hadn't cried for hours before. But I think she was just saying that. Then she started talking about her grandma's garden, the topiary, vegetables, citrus trees, strawberry patch, and the rosebushes she was named for. She said she wanted the baby to have a garden to grow up in, learn about how seeds turn into plants. She had a packet of marigold seeds she was going to plant. I held the baby while Rose talked, and she stopped crying a little. Rose stopped talking and looked at me and asked what was on my clothes and I had to go in and clean up and when I set the baby down she started crying again.

I called Francine while I was inside and she said she was sorry for leaving, but she needed to get her kids to school. She said Rose didn't sleep at all. She said the baby might have slept, but her eyes never closed. But she was quiet for a couple hours just after midnight. I told her I'd see her tonight and got in the shower. There was stuff under my nails that was hard to get out. Then Rose got into the shower with me and asked me to wash her back and I had to tell her she had her clothes on. She looked at me and looked at her clothes like she didn't get it. Then she got it and started crying and told me she was sorry. I held her. She cried and the baby cried.

I'll go see Hydo tonight.

Maybe he really does know the guy.

Chapter 2.

PARK KNEW THERE WAS TROUBLE AT THE GOLD FARM WHEN he saw the door hanging open.

That door was never left open.

To get in you had to stand in front of a camera, be identified by someone inside, and run your finger over a biometric print reader before they buzzed you in. Then you were in the cage, and the inner door of the cage wouldn't open until the outer door closed and locked. So if someone stood out of range of the wide-angle camera lens and held a gun on you while you were cleared, and then tried to come in with you, they'd just end up in the cage. And someone in the box could decide whether to shoot them or gas them or whatever seemed best in the situation.

But the door was hanging open.

And Park didn't have a gun.

A visit like this, he left the gun under the front seat of his Subaru.

He could go get it. But someone inside might need help. The time it took to get to the car and come back, someone inside could be beyond help in that time.

Not that Park was thinking it out or weighing his options. As soon as he saw the open door, his hand reflexively went to the spot on his belt where he'd worn his weapon back when he'd worn a uniform, and then he went in. He may as well have gone for the gun; everyone inside had ample time to spare.

The cage door was open. He looked up at the tiny window near the ceiling and saw no sign of someone crammed behind it in the box. He looked at the floor and saw a series of red smears. Thin strips decorated on one side by a geometric pattern. The edges of half a dozen right footprints, each fainter than the one before, coming from the inner door, leading into the cage, and fading from existence before they could slip outside.

Ignoring the fact that the trail led away, he took his key ring from his pocket, unclipped the Mini Maglite, and palmed it; an inch of the narrow handle jutted from the base of his fist, suitable for sharp blows to the temple, throat, or eyes. But through the door beyond the cage, inside the gold farm itself, the first thing he used it for was to s.h.i.+ne a bright beam of light into Hydo's dead eyes, looking for what he knew he wouldn't find: an impression of the killer's face.

He could have looked in any of their eyes. They were all equally dead.

Hydo. The one whose name Park thought was Zhou. Keebler and Tad and Melrose Tom. There was no sign of Oxnard Tom, but he was pretty much part time at this point, or at least that's what Park had gathered.

Park stood over Hydo's corpse, thinking.

He needed very much to not be there.

Quickly, and with a minimum of disorder, he needed to erase himself from the place.

He looked at the floor.

The room was always kept dim, minimizing reflection on the monitors as the guys plied their trade, but now the only light came from the one remaining corkscrew of energy-efficient bulb that hadn't been broken and the one live monitor that had likewise been spared.

The light cast by the monitor flickered in various shades of green and blue: a forest at night, a dead body pulsing with an ectoplasmic glow in the foreground, a dismal zombie lurching about the edge of the trees. A haunted grove that one of the guys had been mining. Killing hordes of zombies, one at a time, harvesting their meager treasure, banking it all in an ever-growing account, waiting for a buyer.

He s.h.i.+ned the beam from the Maglite over the floor, picked out a blood-free path, and stepped as close to the center of the room as possible. Standing there, he took his phone from his pocket and began to slowly turn in place, snapping a picture after every few degrees of rotation. Finished, he took a similar series of shots covering the floor and ceiling, all the time wis.h.i.+ng he'd bought a phone with a better camera.

Done with his photo map, he knelt next to Hydo, found his BlackBerry, opened the contacts list, and deleted his own number and email before wiping the device and putting it back in the dead man's pocket.

He looked at the ladder bolted to the wall, leading up to the coffin-s.p.a.ce box. There was no one in the box now. No telltale feet sticking out from the opening. No trail of blood running down the wall. Park had been around when Hydo had told one of his guys to change a disk up there in the recorder for the security camera.

His face would be on several of those disks, but it would just be a face. In any case, there were far too many to go through now. His fingerprint biometric would be logged on a hard drive somewhere, but it would only be tagged to a JPEG of his face. Hydo might keep a record of his customers' names, but he wouldn't keep his dealer's name anywhere but his own phone.

Or that's what Park hoped for.

Park looked at the room: well over a hundred thousand dollars in highly portable equipment, some of it riddled with bullets, but nothing obviously missing. That didn't have to mean anything. The true wealth of this place wasn't materially present. Product and payment both were stored elsewhere, hosted on ma.s.sively secure overseas servers. Immediate connections ran to One Wils.h.i.+re, a downtown telco hotel where fiber optics wormed up the exterior, in through windows, converging in the service core, all of it connecting to Pacific submarine cables. Pure bandwidth, hardwired to a durable Far East product: miles of underground bomb shelters converted to climate-controlled server farms. Powered by black market reactors, the most reliable ISPs on the planet. Bulwarks, keeping the ephemeral real, if not touchable.

But while the gold and other treasures the guys farmed and fought and campaigned for online were not in this room, nor the digital payments they received in exchange, still a robbery could have taken place.

A pa.s.sword coerced before the trigger was pulled.

Park counted seconds, setting himself a limit of sixty more before he must leave.

With seventeen seconds remaining, he saw it.

Right at the foot of the ladder, a small workstation. A widescreen XPS Notebook cabled to a travel drive, connected to nothing else. Not the hardwired LAN the other machines in the room shared, not a printer or any other peripheral. Just the power cord running from a surge strip screwed to the baseboard next to eight more just like it, and the travel drive.

Park stepped over Hydo's body, his toe smearing a comma of blood on the sealed cement floor. He stood at the station, looking at the drive, and the red biohazard sticker adhered to its top.

In the months since Beenie had hooked him up with Hydo, and he had become the regular dealer for the farm, he'd seen this station used only once. Sitting in one of the Red Bull-stained Zody chairs, counting white tablets of foxy from his baggie into a Ziploc, he'd nodded when Hydo received a call and told him he had to take it.

Keeping his head down, double counting the savage little pills of 5-methoxy-dijopropyltryptamine, he'd relaxed the muscles around his eyes, letting his peripheral vision widen as his self-defense instructor had taught him, and at the edge of his vision he'd seen Hydo unzip a backpack, take out a small flat box decorated with a single dot of red, and connect it to the sleeping Dell. An action followed by a Bluetooth conversation regarding items such as a Tyrant's Pointing Hand, a Shadow Amulet, Crusader Gauntlets, someone named Thrad Redav, and a large amount of gold.

Park looked at his watch, self-winding, dependent on no power other than his own movement.