"Sure you can, babe, if you max it out. What you do is dump all the energy into the muscles, at a pulse frequency that tells those muscles to do a shitload of work, all at once. The neuromuscular system is literally overwhelmed. Balance goes, muscle control goes, you get a car wreck's worth of confusion, disorientation, all without a bruise."
Flink. Someone lit a cigarette.
"What if he goes into cardiac arrest?"
Price again. "Can't happen."
The mystery female voice: "How come you don't have to haul your own generator around behind you?"
"Power source for this thing is a nine-volt battery."
"That's not for real." Michelle, now a 90 percent certainty.
"Absolutely. Nicad, pretty much like a wristwatch battery."
"Just another fabulous product of human development, right?" Michelle, definitely.
As definitive as the harsh slap to the cheek, jarring.
"Hey? You with us? Speak to me. Wake up. We're at your floor, ma'am. Strap-ons and linens. Hello? Come on, don't play this stupid game where you pretend to be asleep."
"People waking up from operations do that," said the third woman.
Price, impatient: "Oh, don't make me use the name anymore." Beat. "Okay… Art! Mail call!"
***
Art cracked his eyes open. Tear tracks ran back into his ears on both sides of his head, which felt stomped on. The wind screamed and moaned, making its haunted house noises, seemingly blowing right through his skull like a pitch pipe. Hot points of pain on his shins, his arms, his dog-bitten hand.
Suzanne snickered, ''You've got mail!"
Several of Art's kerosene-fed lanterns were grouped on the uprights of the coffee table. The glass top was sprinkled all over the floor in a billion shards, each winking back pinpoints of wavering light. The figure seated on the couch across from Art was a black-hole silhouette of a person; indistinguishable. Another figure crossed behind it, arms folded in contemplation, but with an unmistakable air of supervision or command. That would be Price.
"Can you do anything about these lights?"
Art's head was pointed toward one of the double banks of emergency floods, now fired, but ebbing. He tried to say:
Those batteries have the half-life of a melting candy bar, but nothing came out.
"Ask her does she have a special radio in here, or something?" Art knew this voice, but could not place it, nor could he see past his own desire to squint back toward sleep.
No good. Storm killed everything. Even a ham key won't work.
His body knew he was sitting on his own sofa-one of the trio of them in the living room. The leather cushions sought to suck him in, to drown his body pore by pore.
"You've got blood all over your shirt, Suze."
"That's okay-it's not mine.''
Art tried to push himself up but could not get his arms and legs to cooperate.
"You are currently enjoying the afterburn of a mild tranquilizer," said Price in a facetious tour-guide voice. "Your arms and legs will be like floppy toys for a while. It was either that or, you know, tie you up. The vomit you smell on your shirtfront is an unfortunate side effect. Once you puke, though, it's pretty mellow."
Art could see Price's face, leaning in closer, an Expressionist caricature of deep upthrown shadows, complexion etched by exposure to the elements outside. "You may notice the odd sensation of being naked. If you get feeling back in your extremities and don't tell us, well, it's like a psychological advantage. It was either that or tie you up in your own house. You're less likely to run around playing action heroine with your tits hanging out."
"Do we have to do this?" Michelle said. "I mean, do it this way? It's demeaning. It's not necessary." She was trying to damp-dry her hair with one of Art's towels.
"What the hell do you want?" Art managed. His tongue was framed in stomach bile.
"Well, our own little shindig got compromised, so we thought we'd bring the party to you. You don't mind, right?"
"Make yourself at home."
Price grinned, but it was a pasted-on expression; inappropriate, like the malevolent upturn on the mouth of a puff adder. "Most of our guests you already know. That's Michelle."
Michelle had a cut on her forehead. She kept trying to maneuver the towel around it. "Sorry about all this," she said.
"You already know Suzanne, ah, intimately, as they say."
Suzanne toasted him with a bottle of Dixie Double Hex from his own fridge.
"Bachelorette Number Three, that's Dina, the one who looks like that waterlogged pussycat from the Pepe Le Pew cartoons."
"Price," she said. "I don't see why we have to stay here. Why not do what Michelle says, leave well enough alone." Dina had been the one lighting the cigarette, with a Zippo, from the sound.
"Please shut the fuck up, Dina. You recall Dina, right, Art? You met her in the middle of one of her daily nervous breakdowns."
Art could not see her, but the lazy tracer arc of her cigarette coal told him she was near the kitchen, chain-smoking the night away.
"God, Dina, why don't you just get on your knees, stick your tongue as far out as it'll go, and see if you can find the asshole by touch… and get all that stress out of your system?" Suzanne's voice, from the hallway. "You need to relax."
"Fuck you," Dina returned.
"Ladies, ladies," said Price. "Please save it. Everybody gets to fuck anybody they want, so retract the damned claws, because it's boring. That's all the place settings. I'm afraid we're a couple of guys short of a perfectly balanced porn film."
"What happened to…" Art lost track. "Everybody?"
Price snorted. "Got lost in the storm, like nearly everybody else-at least, everybody that didn't get killed in your house."
"Guys came to evacuate them." Getting the words out was a labor.
"Hey, I am not responsible for what adults decide to do on their own," said Price. "The earlybirds chickened out to Half Moon Bay, like that was any safer. You were right about the windows in that dump. Boom, crash, panic, all gone. Last time I saw-hey, whatser-name, Shinya?" Price turned back to consult Michelle, who nodded. "Little Shinya was headed for the group grope in the cabana; then the cabana blew away. I guess somewhere on the beach there's little clots of naked frozen people, still stuck together like dogs on the lawn. Get the hose."
Suzanne laughed, short, sharp, not a pleasant sound.
"You remember Solomon, the mad surfer? Apparently he disappeared into a monster wave. Can't you just see him, eating his own board while the big whitecap eats him?
Duuuuuuude!
"
To Art, they were still little more than talking heads, floating like errant moons in the lamp flicker and sickly backlight of the floods, which were dying prematurely and inexplicably. Some glitch; some faulty connection or short circuit was draining the batteries.
"Let's see, who else? Luther's fate, you know about. I'll miss that guy. Bryan 's car is still outside-parts of it, anyway-and you should probably fill me in on what happened to that macho dick. I presume he paid for whatever he bought."
"Luther got him." Art found it difficult to clear his throat.
"That's poetic, I guess. Now, Malcolm, our aspiring novelist, he took an interesting turn. He fomented a mini-grass-roots movement to find his inner Neanderthal. Back to nature. You may recall him as the, uh, corpse in your foyer? You hit him with your Jeep?"
"He attacked me."
"Oh, poor baby. Self-defense, and all that, right?"
"She ran over Malcolm?" said Suzanne. "I missed that part."
"Civilized murderers always have the best excuses," said Price. "Malcolm's dead, either way. Exposure would've nailed him. But he lived long enough for his buddies to drag him back to base, where he told some interesting stories about you, roaming around in the middle of a storm. Not quite the modest tale of a quiet architect, is it? You seem to have undergone a few dramatic character shifts of your own."
"They were all high."
"Yep, and from the looks of it, his impromptu tribe came after you, looking for payback, which just happened to be Luther's big wet-dream fantasy come to life. Combat flashbacks, and all that. So did Luther take them all out, or did you help? I really need to know."
"They tried to get in." Art's fingertips were tingling, as though he had slept on them wrong.
"That house between yours and mine? It caught fire. Burned on the inside, then blew away on the outside. There's nothing left but the foundation and a lot of garbage. I think Malcolm and his neo-hunter-gatherers tried to barbecue some animal in the living room and it kind of went haywire."
"Tobias was one of those morons," said Dina, practically without moving her lips. She had moved closer to the circle of light. Art could see her hair drenched and plastered to her scalp by strong rain. Water was probably still running down her neck. That meant Art had not been unconscious for long.
Tobias was the MIA boyfriend of Shinya, the Asian girl Art now remembered. He could have been any one of the tribal contingent. The vandals had all been indistinguishable apart from the patterns on their fake animal skins.
"Maybe ole Tobias stuck that fireman's ax in the front door," said Price. "Actualizing his fantasy of being a get-it-done kind of guy. At least that's more interesting than his usual boring rant about spiking stocks on the internet. Jesus-most of these dudes watch too many guy movies, don't you think, dear?"
"They weren't in their right mind," said Art. "You gave them that drug."
Price was never less than cagey. "Now wait just a minute. I didn't force anybody to ingest anything. What you saw was all free will in flower."
"You didn't tell them what would happen."
"Hey, I'm not a mystic seer, okay? Someone wants to plug down mystery drugs at my party, they're responsible for their own actions."
"But you supplied the mystery drugs."
"True. But so what?"
What Art wanted to do was sleep for a week. What he did not want to do was play semantic Ping-Pong with Price, who might not get to his point before next New Year's. "I saw what your pills did to that guy Bryan. And Suzanne. And Dina. And even Luther. You're responsible for all this."
Price's voice went flat, into the threat register Art recalled from the party. "Reconsider the burdens of responsibility, before you start flinging accusations around."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Price returned his gaze directly, eye to eye. "I mean, I want to know what kind of chemical cocktail you're on. I'd love to try it."
"I was minding my own business."
Price sat closer to Art and squeezed his bare knee, though Art could not yet feel anything down there. "You know why I doled out my free party mix? Because, my new friend, I wanted to see what all those losers would do. Just like I wanted to see what you would do, given a bit of shake-up."
"I don't even know you," said Art. His brain sloshed in his head and a wave of nausea nearly brought more vomit. The dimly lit room in front of him was oozing in and out of focus.
"What-hell, you don't even know you. You think this was easy, all of us girding our loins and calling you air, pretending you're some widowed rich guy in his super-house, hermited in with his dog and his gun collection, boom-boom-boom every fucking day on the beach, no human contact except with ole Rocko at the
Toot 'N Moo
. Like a lab rat just begging for a tumor shot. I couldn't resist you."
This was really beginning to pain Art's consciousness. "Price… I don't understand any of this.''
Suzanne handed Price a Dixie Double Hex. Price took a long swig and smacked his lips. "Okay, let's try another angle: I've been in that house down the beach for, say, a month. House between-Spilsbury's-is all boarded up for the off-season, nobody home. But here's this person, this presence, you in all your wonderfulness, next to the jetty. We're your closest human contact, and we never see you, not even once by chance. You don't even stop by to make neighborly introductions, borrow a cup of whatever. That's cool; privacy is a precious thing. But now I'm curious. So I surveilled you out. Watched you do target practice, watched you walk your dog. It gave me an excuse to get all camouflaged and stealth around on the beach. Your routine is completely locked, man, and I began to wonder what you were up to, what you were about. So Michelle and I waited until you went to get supplies at the store, and came a little closer. First thing we see is a house crammed to the rafters with security, more than a goddamn bank. So I took a look at your mail, which comes like clockwork every Thursday. You scoop it up when you toddle out of your fortress to dump the trash, so I had a window of about an hour between the time the mail got to the box, versus when it got to you. Your bank statements indicate that you are comfortably well-off, but not rich; in fact, you're looking for some new gig. But it turns out your happy hubby didn't die. He left you."
"My wife," said Art. "Lorelle died. Two years ago."
"No way,'' said Price. "Your goddamned husband lives in New York City with some lady journalist-don't you read the fucking letters?"
It was suddenly impossible to draw breath. The storm was sucking the air right out of Art. Spots blossomed in his vision. He felt doped or delirious. The ferocity of the weather began to tilt the house, or maybe that was an illusion, too. His heart began to thud so hard in his chest that it constricted his throat. Somewhere between heartbeats, midnight came and went, unnoticed.