He was still smiling at the thought of committing a crime against coffee connoisseurs the world over when he cleared the trees and saw that somebody had discovered his car.
A man was standing ten feet from it, his back to Carter. He wasn’t moving, just looking at the car like a man might stand motionless near a horse or a cow, for fear of spooking it. Carter was quiet on his feet, but the man heard his approach all the same and turned to face him.
He wasn’t very old, early to mid-twenties, Carter guessed, and he surely wasn’t very handsome. He stood about five feet ten, and must have been carrying around 240 pounds. He looked at Carter through heavy-lidded eyes with the attitude of a corpulent child.
“You shouldn’t park here,” he said. Then, belatedly, “This your car?”
Carter smiled a friendly smile, although battling banjos had suddenly appeared on his internal sound track. The man was wearing faded jeans, a pair of battered blue and white sneakers failing at the toe caps, and a lumberjack short-sleeved shirt over a gray tee.
“Yes. I got lost. I couldn’t see the through road. Could you tell me where I am, please?”
“This is Waite’s Bill,” said the man. His slow speech worked with the half-closed eyes to give the effect that he was sleepwalking. “This is private property.”
“I’m sorry,” said Carter. “I got lost. I didn’t realize I was trespassing.”
At least that explained the sudden change in civic ambience, he thought. Waite Road was essentially a gated community, water providing its fences and sheer antisocial weirdness acting as its gate. He wondered how anybody got on the housing list here. Then he wondered why anyone would want to get on the housing list in the first place.
The man had lost interest in him, but was looking out into the bay. A handsome motor yacht was passing by, heading out to sea.
“Nice yacht,” said Carter. “Okay for some, huh?”
He noticed the man look up a little; he hadn’t been looking at the yacht at all, but only the water.
“Don’t want a boat,” said the man. “I want to go swim.”
Carter frowned. It didn’t seem very warm out there, and the undertows would be fierce. “I’m not sure that’s such a good place to go swimming. Maybe the other side of the bill…?”
“I’m good at swimming,” said the man.
Carter doubted that, but said nothing. The man seemed tractable, though, so perhaps he could get some local background out of him. He walked over to stand by him, mapping out a conversational strategy to befriend him on the way. The guy was obviously very into swimming, so that would be his “in.” Fine.
He stood by the man, looked out over the dark waters of the Providence River as they wound out into the ocean, drew a breath to speak, and then everything went to shit.
At some point, everyone suffers small physiological glitches. The human body is, after all, a complex entity, and tiny perturbations in its structure and chemistry can have notable, frightening effects. From a sudden-onset migraine to the random, racing heartbeats of atrial fibrillation, down to smaller effects such as a nervous tic or a brief period of blurred vision in one eye. The body usually compensates, and the troublesome effect passes.
For several long seconds, this is what Carter believed. His primary concern was that the changes in his perception meant that he could not safely drive until the small glitch in his metabolism passed. He would be glad when it did; a sour yellowness had settled upon his vision and it made him feel soul sick. It was like looking at the world in old photographs—not with the warmth of sepia, but damaged pictures found in an old box, a transparent cellophane-like layer separating from the image like an insect’s wing.
No sooner had the thought crossed his mind, when he realized the underlying truth of it; he felt he was seeing the world through someone else’s perception. His own, but not him.
Carter’s sight blurred with double images, multiple images, and they were not the same. He was breathing heavily, becoming aware of the sound of his breath rasping in and out of his throat, the coldness in his lungs. What a shambolic scarecrow a human is. How full of paradox and obsolescence. Life quivered fitfully inside him, a flickering light in a stormy universe. He felt small and inconsequential. He felt the truth pressing in upon him, up from the ancient Earth beneath him, down from the still more ancient stars above, a pressure of reality that would crush him like a louse between fingernails.
He was vaguely aware that he had fallen to his knees, one hand on the cold grass of the riverside. He was too far from normal sensation to even feel panic at what he was experiencing. He was beyond fear, beyond wonder, beyond reason on a spectrum that tended into a darkness he could not fathom.
He knew he could no longer trust his perceptions, that he was suffering some sort of fit, some sort of fugue state. It didn’t matter how real the waves of motion beneath his fingers felt, as if the ground were nothing more than a thin sheet beneath which a billion, billion worms and roots writhed; it wasn’t real. It didn’t matter that he saw across the bay clumsily superimposed upon itself, again and again, juddering images of the built-up land he knew, along with banks of primal woodland that had never seen humans, and strange tall buildings constructed of some smooth, red-orange stone that glowed in the rays of a sun that was behind the clouds; it wasn’t real. He saw the water and the sky join in a flickering, jagged line and the line, a synthetic horizon, travel toward him emitting a crackling roar as all creation flexed in ontological agony.
It was real. As real as anything else. As real as anything had ever been.
Carter wanted it to stop, would do anything for it to stop. Nothing existed except for the torment of the moment. There was no past and no memories, there was no future and no hope. There was only the now, and the anguish of that thin slice of existence. He could bear it no longer. He had already suffered a second, or a minute, or a year, or forever, and it had to stop, and he knew where the stop switch was.
He fumbled for his pistol.
He felt the front sight tap against his incisors.
He worried momentarily about chipping the enamel, even though the frame was polymer, not steel.
He thought of Charlie Hammond’s S&W Model 5946.
He thought of Charlie Hammond.
* * *
He didn’t fire.
* * *
In Atlantic City, Bernie Hayesman looked at the plate of ribs, and he was not happy. He had asked for an omelet, a simple omelet to be sent up to his office, and they had sent ribs. He couldn’t understand it. He’d spoken to the chef personally. They’d discussed eggs, if briefly. There was no earthly way “omelet” could have been misconstrued as “ribs.” He looked at the plate of ribs, and the ribs looked back. Neither he nor they were overjoyed at the situation.
The runner who’d brought in the food was hanging around the door, looking nervous. Hayesman was generally considered a good guy, but woe betide anyone who screwed up, because then he would come down upon them like the wrath of Jove. The runner couldn’t see how he could be blamed for this particular screwup, but he was nevertheless wary of the possibility. “I could get it changed,” he said. “Should I ask them to do an omelet, boss?”
Hayesman waved a hand dismissively. “It’s cool. I’ll eat these. You can go.”
The runner left, and Hayesman was left alone with the ribs.
He ate them slowly and unwillingly. The last time he’d had them, he’d ended up eating most of them cold because of that asshole kid and his roulette “system.”
Then Rand and her team had come back after kicking the guy out, and they’d looked kind of freaked-out. Rand had kept herself on an even keel until she’d sent her people back on the floor. Then she’d sat down without permission. She was ex-services, and she
never
sat down in the presence of a superior without permission. She’d told Hayesman about the slots, and how she’d taken the ones that had hit near-as-dammit simultaneous jackpots out of service and called in the engineer. She said she didn’t expect him to find anything, but she was really keen for a rational explanation.
The engineer didn’t find anything. The slots showed no signs of having been interfered with in any way, and the probabilities set on the reels were absolutely in line with house rules.
“He figured out what the chances of all four machines jackpotting at the same time were,” she’d said. Hayesman had never seen the usually unflappable Rand so shaken. “That kid said some numbers when we threw him out. I can’t swear to it, but I think he said what the odds were. They were massive, boss. Astronomical.”
Hayesman had told her that it was nothing. Just a conjuring trick, just some dick trying to make himself look good. That she shouldn’t worry about it.
Hayesman worried about it. If the kid had been smarter about how he used whatever shtick he had come up with—and the thing with the slots had convinced him that there
was
some shtick—he could have taken the casino for a lot more than he had. He’d been so barefaced about it, though. Like he didn’t care.
Hayesman belched. Great. Now the ribs he hadn’t ordered and didn’t want were giving him gas.
He decided he was going to start an investigation in the morning. Casino laws in some other countries were sticklers about gamblers identifying themselves beforehand, but he didn’t have a clear idea who the kid had been. There was surveillance footage, though. Maybe if they could find him going to his car, they could get a license plate and go from there.
He didn’t feel so good. He pushed the plate away from him. No more of those. He’d eaten enough. He felt his gut moil slowly within him like a languorous sea creature.
He didn’t like the thought of bringing in upper management on this. They’d want to know why he didn’t get the guy’s name at the time, and he had no good answer to that because, simply put, he’d underestimated him. He hadn’t taken the guy seriously and, by the time he pulled that Harry Potter shit with the slots, it was too late. Better late than never, though, and at least the Oceanic could earn some brownie points with the community by putting the shout-out on somebody who might break banks if he wasn’t spotted early enough.
Hayesman grimaced. That omelet was looking really good about now. He didn’t usually have an acid digestion, but he had a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in the bathroom for the rare times it troubled him.
He made to stand, and sat down again immediately. Something was definitely wrong with his guts. Maybe flu. He really needed to get to the bathroom in case it was something violent. He’d had sudden-onset flu once in his life, and had not enjoyed the moment when he lost control of his bowels.
He didn’t dare move from his seat, however. The internal pressure in his bowels was becoming painful. He felt bloated, and … no, he could feel
bloating
, could feel his guts swelling inside him. This was bad, he could tell. Not just inconveniently bad. This was really, health-threateningly bad.
He decided he had to risk the short walk to his office’s en suite bathroom. He would have to do it doubled over and with his ass clenched, but whatever was wrong with him was getting worse, and out was definitely better than in.
When he tried to rise, though, he couldn’t. He tried again, but his legs and arms were too enfeebled to lift his body. His first thought was, again, flu, and that it had weakened him. But he dismissed that almost immediately. He didn’t
feel
weak. He had suffered the enervating effects of illness enough in his life to know how that sapping of strength felt, and this wasn’t it. His muscles felt normal, with none of the aches that flu would have caused. It took him several seconds to realize the truth, and he immediately disregarded it as impossible. Then the chair groaned beneath him and he had to accept it.
He was growing heavier, putting on weight literally by the second. His clothes felt tight. He watched with too much disbelief to be horrified as the legs of his pants grew taut with the expanding flesh within. Then he was distracted by the sight of his stomach visibly expanding. A shirt button popped off.
It wasn’t possible. It just couldn’t be happening. He shoved the half-finished plate of ribs away from him, looking for reasons no matter how absurd and settling upon some incredible form of poisoning. Even as the plate skidded away from him across the surface of the desk, he knew it wasn’t the cause. He fumbled with the handset for the casino’s secure communications and for a terrified moment almost dropped it. If it ended up on the floor, he doubted he could reach it. Already the arms of his chair were digging into his sides, pinning him in it.
“Rand!” he blurted as soon as he opened the “red” channel for emergencies. “Help me! For Christ’s sake, help me!”
There was no reply for a moment, the longest moment. Then Rand said, “Boss? What’s happening? What’s wrong?”
“I’m sick, I think. Something’s wrong with me. I’m in trouble, Alia. Help me…”
The last word turned into a groan as the chair arms dug deep into the sides of his growing torso.
* * *
Hayesman never, ever used first names with staff. He was old-school. Rand didn’t have a problem with it; it kept things military and she was fine with that. Hearing him call her “Alia” shocked her more than if he’d been screaming. She set off for his office at a sprint, palms flat, arms pumping, shouting an order at a hospitality greeter as she went by him to call 911, medical emergency in Hayesman’s office.
* * *
He couldn’t even look down anymore. His neck had swollen and might as well have been in a cervical collar for all the movement he could manage. The underside of his desk was digging into the upper thighs, and he could feel and hear seams giving way in his clothes. His feet were in agony; he wore good shoes and they were refusing to split.
He was going to die. He knew that. There were so many things left to do, some bridges to rebuild, some things to attend to. He regretted that the chances to attend to them were now gone for good, and he would die with so much unfinished business. He’d worked too much, he realized. That old work-life balance. He’d fucked it up and now he was going to die unfulfilled, and all the hours and concentration he’d given to the casino were nothing to him.