The Complex Read online

  Grady saw a lot of things during his time in Vietnam—the type of things a person spent the rest of their lives trying to forget. But in some ways, what he saw during those two days in Detroit were worse than the most savage atrocity committed by the Viet Cong. Detroit, and particularly 12th Street, was a war zone. There were storefronts and row-homes instead of bamboo and mud huts, Molotov cocktails rather than punji sticks, concrete instead of rice paddies, and Saturday Night Specials instead of M-16s, but it was a war all the same.

  They mustered at a local high school, where Grady and the other black soldiers were given the option of not going out onto the streets. Instead, they were informed that if they wanted to, they could pull service duty instead—laundry, kitchen, communications, and other jobs around the temporary base. Grady had declined, knowing that if he opted for a support role, he’d never see himself the same again from the eyes of his fellow soldiers. Maybe they wouldn’t think less of him, but he would expect them to, and that was just as bad.

  And so, armed with rubber bullets and sheaths over their bayonets, they’d marched out into the city, showing force and guarding utility workers and emergency responders. Within two days of their deployment, the riots ended, leaving more than forty people dead. During those two days, Grady witnessed police officers—the same police officers he was there to support—abusing citizens in their custody. He was attacked by both blacks and whites, and called an Uncle Tom and a race traitor more times than he could count. Worst of all was the mindset of the rioters and looters, the frenzied madness which seemed to claim them all. Their grievances were legitimate. Grady agreed with them, intellectually and emotionally. He even empathized—to a point—with their desire for violence. But what he saw occurring had nothing to do with justice or revolution or even simple payback. It was more a pack mentality, an animalistic mindset of violence for violence’s sake—a whirlwind that sucked in everyone it came into contact with.

  That’s where he is now. In the dream, Grady is back on 12th Street, being spit upon and taunted by his own people, being called a sellout, while rape and murder and arson and looting occur all around him. He smells gasoline and smoke, hears people screaming, flames crackling, sirens wailing, and gunshots ringing out in the night, and somewhere behind it all, a chainsaw roars.

  The sounds continue when he wakes, lurching upright in bed and immediately gritting his teeth at the pain the sudden movement has spurred in his bad back. Pain flares in his hands and knees, as well—his arthritis letting him know that it’s awake, too, and ready for another day.

  Wincing, Grady slowly inches to the side of the bed and puts his feet on the floor. He feels disoriented. He takes a nap most evenings, but he doesn’t usually wake feeling like this, and he rarely has bad dreams during those naps, either. Outside, the sirens and the drone of the chainsaw continues. Someone screams. Staccato gunshots echo. Grady shakes his head and rubs his eyes. At first, he thinks the sounds of chaos are just leftover impressions from his nightmare, but they don’t fade as he comes fully awake. If anything, they get louder.

  One of Grady’s friends from the war, another black man named Johnny Walker, used to suffer from occasional flashbacks—or at least, he did until ten years ago, when cancer ate him down to nothing. The doctors at the Veteran’s Administration said the cancer was from smoking, but Grady knew the truth. Johnny had brought that cancer back home with him from Vietnam, and it had lurked inside of him all that time. Grady has never had a flashback to the war, or to anything else from his time in the army. But he’s convinced he’s having one now—a flashback of the riots.

  His knees pop as he clambers from bed, and his sciatic nerve is as taut as a guitar string, but he ignores the pain, focusing instead on what he’s hearing. It all certainly sounds real enough. The sirens have stopped, but the other sounds have definitely increased. His first urge is to call 911, but the phone is all the way in the kitchen. Grady used to have one of those little cellular flip phones, but his arthritis made operating the tiny buttons an exercise in futility, so now he relies on his old-fashioned rotary phone. His daughter, on her twice-annual visits, thinks this is funny. He likes to remind her that arthritis is hereditary. She doesn’t find that as amusing as his phone.

  Instead of making the call, Grady decides to check the bedroom window. The thought occurs to him that this might still be part of the dream. Grady recently turned seventy, and the shadow of dementia weighs on him. His mother died of Alzheimer’s, and in his opinion, burning to death in a burst of clinging napalm would be preferable to that. These days, he’s inclined to worry any time he momentarily forgets something, be it putting his keys in the ashtray next to the door where he also keeps his spare change, or the name of the girl he had a crush on in fifth grade. If the sounds aren’t real—and how could they be—then…

  He takes a deep breath. The gunshots have ceased, but the chainsaw is still buzzing as its operator revs the throttle again and again. The screams have turned to shouts now, and there’s a thumping sound overhead, as if someone is moving furniture. It doesn’t seem like the commotion is coming from directly overhead, but rather, from apartment 1-D. That’s where the writer lives. Grady doesn’t know what he writes. Books, he supposes. Or maybe articles. Grady has nodded at the guy in passing, but they’ve never spoken. He only knows the man is a writer because that’s what Tina, Grady’s former neighbor, told him. Grady misses Tina. He vastly preferred living next door to her, rather than the two druggies who currently occupy apartment 5-D. Grady isn’t exactly sure what kind of drugs they’re on. He’s smelled pot smoke coming from their apartment before, and he doesn’t give a shit about that. Lord knows he’s smoked his share over the years. But those two guys are obviously on some heavier stuff. Meth, maybe. Or crack. Or one of those new synthetic drugs he’s heard about on the news, which makes people’s skin break out in bleeding, open sores, or causes them to overheat, rip off their clothes, and act all crazy. Who would willingly ingest something like that?

  Mercy, mercy me, Grady thinks. Ol’ Marvin Gaye was right. Things most surely aren’t what they used to be. And it ain’t just the ecology.

  Grady realizes that he’s standing in the middle of his bedroom, daydreaming rather than taking action. Frowning, he creeps over to the window.

  All of the units in the Pine Village Apartment Complex are built as split-level structures. The four apartments at the front of the building, where the parking lot is located, are actually above the four apartments at the rear of the building. The residents of apartments 5-D through 9-D have to park their cars out front and then walk down a small hillside to the rear of the building to access their front doors. As a result, while their living room and kitchen windows face out on a lovely stretch of woodland and a large yard, the windows in their bedrooms are set high in the wall, near the ceiling, and display window wells and the edge of the parking lot, rather than any picturesque scenery. Sometimes, when Grady has accidentally left the blinds open, he can see the upstairs neighbor’s feet as they walk by, although never any higher than their ankles. A few times, Grady has tried to see up Mrs. Carlucci’s dress, but his attempts have been frustratingly unsuccessful.

  He raises up on his tiptoes and peeks out the blind, craning his neck to see. Grady frowns, unsure of what’s happening. He glimpses dozens of bare feet and bare legs. Some of them are bloody. They’re all converging on the front of the building, as if whoever the feet are attached to are pressing themselves against the windows and doors of the apartments above. The banging noises are louder now, and Grady hears glass shatter. Someone shouts. Their words are lost beneath another gunshot.

  It is then that Grady decides this is definitely not a dream. Nor is it a flashback. This is happening. This is all very real. The whirlwind that consumed Detroit has returned.

  Moving as fast as his arthritis will allow, Grady grabs his keys from atop the dresser and opens his underwear drawer. Inside, half hidden beneath ratty boxer shorts and faded, hole-ridden socks, is a l
ocked steel pistol box. He pulls the box out and sets it on the dresser, noticing as he does that his hands are not shaking. He’s scared, yes, but that old training is kicking in. Just like riding a bike.

  He grimaces as a burp, sour and acidic and tasting of fear, bubbles up inside him.

  Grady uses his key to unlock the box, pulls out his Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, loads it, and then makes his way to the kitchen. He tries the phone, intent on calling 911, but there’s no dial tone. He clicks the receiver a few times, but is only met with more silence.

  Hanging up the phone, Grady glances down at his shoes, which are lined up against the alcove wall between the kitchen and the living room, next to the front door. He hesitates, feeling a tightness in his chest. His breath hitches, and he becomes aware that he’s sweating. He readjusts his grip on the pistol, waiting for the pain in his chest to subside. Eventually, it starts to, albeit slowly.

  Grady glances at the front door, making sure it’s locked. Then his gaze returns to his shoes. He debates what to do next. If he were a younger man, there would be no question. He’d go outside and help whoever is in trouble. But he is not a younger man, and he’s not going to help anybody if he has a heart attack in the parking lot or has to defend somebody and can’t get off a shot fast enough because his arthritic fingers won’t squeeze the trigger fast enough.

  His heart is still beating fast, but the pain is gone now. He moves to the living room window, parts the blinds, and peeks outside. His eyes widen in surprise. There are perhaps two dozen naked people running across the yard toward the building. Between them and his front door is a short young man with brownish-blond hair and glasses. Squinting, Grady recognizes him as Adam Love. He and his fiancée share an apartment together in the C-building. Grady knows them because their dog got loose last year and ended up at Grady’s apartment door. Since then, the two younger people always wave at him in passing, or make small talk with him if their paths happen to cross, usually at the garbage dumpsters or the complex’s laundromat. Last winter, when there was nine inches of snow on the ground and Grady’s arthritis was particularly bad, Adam had been kind enough to shovel Grady’s sidewalk for him (because if the tenants waited for Pine Village’s management to clear the snow, they’d have to wait for Spring).

  Adam’s expression is terrified, and his forehead is bloody. He glances behind him as he runs, stumbles, and then falls sprawling onto the grass. The naked people charge toward him, waving a variety of weapons.

  “Get up!” Grady slams his fist against the window, shaking the blinds. “Get up, goddamn it!”

  Adam struggles to his feet, but he seems disoriented. As he wipes the blood from his forehead, his pursuers close the gap between them and him. Adam doesn’t notice. Instead, he stares at the blood on his hand.

  Cursing, Grady unlocks the door and steps outside.

  Seven - The Exit: Apartment 7-D

  As the Exit, Javier Mendez has killed one-hundred and thirty-seven people over the last fifteen years, but it’s not something he enjoys doing. He reads what the newspapers and the serial killer websites say about him—all the reasons and speculation they give for why he does what he does—and all of them are wrong. Wrong about his possible identity (they think he’s a white man in his thirties), wrong about his motives (they say it’s everything from rage at the modern world to an abusive childhood), and wrong about his psyche (that he’s a sociopath who is driven by an uncontrollable urge to kill). He only kills when he has to. It is something he avoids doing unless absolutely necessary.

  Which is why he doesn’t start running over the naked people with his car until they attack him.

  He has just gotten home after a six-hour round-trip drive to Rockaway, New Jersey, where he was closing a doorway before one of the entities from the place outside the universe broke through. The spaces between realities are full of such creatures. They travel a path beyond space and time, looking for an entrance into the world, and their attempted breaches are happening more and more often. That’s why his work is more important than ever before, and that is why he can’t allow himself to be caught. It’s also the reason he gets so annoyed with the press and the internet experts who claim to understand his motivations. They understand nothing. He is an exit. He closes doorways before they open. He knows all-too-well what will happen if he doesn’t, because he’s seen it in his dreams. Those nightmares always begin the same way—with him not closing a doorway in time, and then one of the entities gains access to the world. In one dream, a living darkness engulfs the planet, devouring anything with a spark of life—people, animals, even the plants. In another dream, most of the world is flooded after a terrible deluge, and giant worms and other bizarre monstrosities slaughter the survivors. In yet another nightmare, the dead come back to life as zombies and hunt humanity into extinction. In another, there’s a war between the zombies and some sort of bizarre ocean monsters that looks like a cross between a crab and a scorpion and a lobster.

  The vast majority of these attempted breaches occur in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The general populace remain blissfully unaware of them, but not so the Exit. He knows all about them, and what’s more, he knows why they’re happening. The culprit is the Interstate Highway System. With a total length of forty-seven thousand, seven hundred and fourteen miles, it is the second longest highway system in the world, exceeded only by one in China. As originally designed, it was supposed to be in the shape of an ancient and extremely complex magical glyph, but that never happened because two of the original interstates, I-95 and I-70, have missing interchanges that were never completed. Because the highway system—and thus the glyph—isn’t contiguous, the walls of reality are thin in the Mid-Atlantic region.

  And that is why the Exit kills. It has nothing to do with his childhood or his mental health. He kills because sealing off a breach and turning an entrance into an exit requires a sacrifice. Whenever he senses that a breach is about to occur anywhere in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, or West Virginia, he goes there to stop it, and the only way to prevent something like that from happening is with blood. He kills because he has to. He kills because it was the only way to save the lives of everyone else. He kills because it is his job.

  He’s not crazy. If he was crazy then his stomach wouldn’t be churning right now, and he wouldn’t be so short of breath, as his tires crunch over a naked man who, only seconds ago, had been swinging a sledgehammer at the hood of his car.

  He’d first noticed something was wrong upon exiting Interstate 83 and taking the ramp onto Route 30 in York. Dozens of emergency vehicles rushed past, on their way to elsewhere. Then, he’d spotted several fires—two residences engulfed in flames and a fire burning at the old Caterpillar plant. Finally, while driving along Route 24 through Manchester, he’d spotted a woman standing along the side of the road, clutching a knife and staring intently at the passing traffic. But, unlike the people here in the parking lot of the Pine Village Apartment Complex, she hadn’t been naked.

  He had avoided checking his phone, because he was a stickler about not getting pulled over and not causing an accident. Stupidity led to being caught, and being caught wasn’t something that he—or the world—could afford. He’d tried the local radio stations, but all of them were playing prerecorded, syndicated shows, except for WSBA, which curiously, seemed to be off the air. But as more police cars rushed past him, he’d wondered if there were even any units available for speed traps and traffic control tonight.

  He made it home without further incident. Then, as he’d pulled into the parking lot at the complex, looking forward to curling up on the couch in his apartment and perhaps reading a book for a little while before bed, he’d seen the mob—dozens and dozens of crazed, nude people swarming the grounds and attacking the residents of the complex. They kicked in doors and crawled through broken windows, and carried a bizarre array of weaponry. They kicked, clubbed, and hacked a man lying on the sidewalk, and held a woman in place
while another among their ranks slammed the dumpster door against her head over and over again. They shot a wailing child and stabbed a fleeing teenager. They glared, snarled, and sneered at him, illuminated in his headlights as he slowed to a halt.

  The Exit paused, running through his options as the mob converged toward him, acting almost as one. His knife and the rest of his tools were in the trunk, so the Exit used the only weapon he had available. Easing his foot off the brake, he pressed the accelerator and slammed into the crowd.

  Now, he’s made it halfway across the complex, just passing by Building C, and the crowd hasn’t lessened. If anything, there seem to be more of them. One of the naked people bludgeons his driver’s side door with a fire extinguisher while another knocks out one of his headlights with a rock. The car shakes and rattles, being struck from all sides, but he keeps his foot on the gas, knowing that if he stops now, he’ll be dead. He swerves and veers, clipping as many of them as he can while simultaneously trying not to run over a large mass of attackers, lest he get stuck.

  He bears down on a man with a gun looming in his lone headlight. The man looks like a bodybuilder, all six-pack abs and swollen bulges, and his naked skin shines with sweat. He raises the gun as the Exit plows into him. There’s a flash and then a boom, but the gun is pointed upward as the weightlifter disappears beneath the front bumper. The car bounces up and down, the shocks groaning in protest, and then begins to shudder as the man gets caught on the undercarriage. The Exit gives it more gas and glances in the rearview mirror long enough to see the wet, red stain he’s leaving in the car’s wake. Worse is the sound the body makes as it is scraped along the pavement. He can hear it even though the windows are closed and the people outside are howling. He doesn’t think he’s ever heard a more horrendous sound. It reminds him of wet Velcro.