The Apocalypse Club (18 page)

“Uhh…where did you get all that stuff?” I asked. When I’d thought it was a burglar, I had reached into my pocket and grabbed my keys so they protruded out from between my fingers like makeshift claws. I did not loosen my grip on them. This was not a burglar, though. Burglars did not, generally, carry things
in
to the house.

“Your kitchen was missing several items I needed,” she said. “You can thank me later.”

“Sorry,” I said, pulling out my phone. “Did you text me or something to let me know you were coming? Maybe I missed it.”

“Sorry, no,” she said, finely slicing what looked like an eggplant. “It’s not a good idea for me to broadcast my movements too widely at the moment. I hope it’s not inconvenient.”

“No, no,” I said, relaxing my grip on my keys but not letting them go. If she decided to come at me with that knife, my apartment key wasn’t going to be of much use, but I didn’t get the impression she was going to do that. “Um…what are you making?”

“Moussaka. It’s my favourite dish from back home.”

It certainly did sound better than what I had been planning to make myself. I decided that I was not going to be burgled or robbed and pitched in to help.

That was at the end of October. The next time she appeared was in the middle of January. She was waiting in front of the entrance to the subway around the corner from the library. I had been planning to go downtown to catch a movie.

“Mind if I tag along?”

“You don’t know where I’m going.”

“Wanna bet?”

I did not. I had a feeling I would lose. So we went to the movies. After that, we went to dinner at a Greek place in Yorkville she had heard good things about.

“You’re not really a student, are you?” I said after the waiter had deposited plates of spanakopita and souvlaki.

“Everyone’s a student, Mark,” she said, smiling.

“How did you know I was going to the movies?”

“You bought your ticket online.”

“You’re tapping my phone?” I didn’t really say this like a question.

“Relax! There are nasty people out there. I’m just trying to look out for you.”

“This isn’t exactly fair. You probably know more about me than I do. I know almost nothing about you.”

“True,” she said, taking a sip of wine.

“I don’t know what you do or where you disappear to for three months at a time.”

“I did say
almost
everything.”

The next time I saw her was at the end of April. I had just completed exams and was mentally wiped out. It had been a brutal winter and the last dregs of it had only melted away a week before. I had the weekend off. I had gone to one of my favourite downtown pubs, sat at a table on the busy patio, and ordered a pint and some wings. I had just taken the first sip of my pint when she dropped into the chair opposite me. She was wearing a light cotton summer dress with a red and green flower print. Her hair was pinned back in a loose ponytail.

“Mind if I join?”

I shrugged and tried to play it cool. The reality of the situation was I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her. After her last disappearance, I had even tried to track her down, but my amateur detecting was even less successful than my first attempt. There was no record of her anywhere. I tried replying to her old texts, but got automated replies advising the number was no longer in service. If she wasn’t sitting across from me, I would have been able to make a convincing case that she didn’t exist. I had gotten so worked up about it at one point that I had even started to doubt that she did. Maybe my brain was malfunctioning. I even called my doctor to see what the waiting list was for a CAT scan, but they wouldn’t give me one without me having to explain why I thought I might need it, so I dropped the idea.

“So, what’s good here?” she asked after the waiter had come by to hand her a menu.

“I would have thought you would already know the answer to that,” I said.

She smiled. “You look exhausted.”

“Just finished exams. But I imagine you knew that, too.”

The waiter came by again. She ordered a plate of antojitos and a glass of chilled white wine. I took a long drag of my pint.

“So next year is your last year,” she said. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do when you’re done?”

I was tempted to ask for her suggestions, but decided that would be stepping from catty to downright rude. Besides, I was thrilled to see her again and didn’t want to drive her away. But at the same time, I also hated myself a little for being so excited to see her, so that was simmering away in there as well.

“Haven’t thought about it yet,” I said. “If all else fails, there’s always the video store.”

She laughed. The waiter arrived with her glass of wine, which she accepted with a polite nod. “Yes, I suppose there is that. I don’t think it will last long enough for you to retire on it, though.”

There was a pause while we sat and looked at each other.

“You look marvellous,” I said, trying to make it sound campy and not succeeding.

“Thanks,” she said. “Truth is that I’m pretty burned out, too. I’m taking some time off.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” I said. “It must be exhausting to have to be so mysterious all the time. Where are you going? Oh wait, never mind. Just send me a random post card from somewhere and you can withhold all the details the next time I see you.”

“Come with me.”

“What? Where?”

“Paris. For a week.”

The food arrived, but I was too stunned to realize it. I opened my mouth a couple of times, but was having trouble making any sound come out.

My mind was reeling. Paris? The one in France? Surely she was kidding. Who just up and left for Paris out of the blue with someone who was so mysterious as to qualify as a total stranger? Where was my passport? Was it still valid? Didn’t I have a shift at the video store on Wednesday? Would I be able to get Caitlin to cover it for me? What kind of cell plan extension would I need to get? Did I need to get shots?

“Are you serious?”

She smiled, perhaps wistfully. “No. But it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?”

Something snapped. “Dammit, Violet, what are you doing here? You show up every few months or so and then just disappear again. I never know where you’re going or what you’re doing or even if you’ll ever come back! And now you show up and ask me if I want to go to Paris and then say ‘
just kidding
’? What the hell is wrong with you?”

I would’ve gotten up and left at that point, but I hadn’t paid and didn’t have a loose twenty dollar bill I could just throw down defiantly on the table. I was aware that people at other tables were looking at us. The waiter was also looking anxiously in our direction. I didn’t care. I was well past that point.

“You’re right, Mark,” Violet said. Was she rattled or upset? I couldn’t tell. “It’s not a great idea for us to see each other.”

“
See
each other?” I said, managing to bring my voice back down close to conversation levels. “Is that your definition of what this is?”

She leaned across the table. “Let me ask you something. After that night at the Weather Station, why didn’t you tell anybody?”

What did this have to do with anything? “Why didn’t I tell anybody? Probably because they’d lock me up. That’s what your buddy Mister Black said they would do, anyway. Besides, who in the world would believe me? I was there and I’m starting to wonder if I still believe it myself.”

She slumped back in her chair. “Exactly. You don’t know much, but it’s still more than just about everybody else. I don’t have a lot of friends, Mark. There aren’t hundreds of people out there I can just sit down and talk to without getting bombarded with questions about what I do or where. I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you’d like me to do.”

She reached up and wiped away tears. Damn. There was no way I was going to be able to stand up to that.

“I’m sorry,” I said, impulsively reaching across the table and grabbing her wrist to keep her from getting up. “I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just this whole thing is very…weird.”

“You have no idea how weird it is.”

“Try me. I work in a video store. You wanna know which city councillor has rented a documentary about sex with zoo animals seven times? I can tell you. Seems like a nice woman. What she does with her evenings in Scarborough is entirely her business.”

“Okay, yes. That is weird. I mean a different weird.”

“Which, of course, you can’t possibly discuss.”

She looked around. “Not here, I can’t. Can we go back to your place?”

“T
hey found me when I was eight,” she says, putting her wine glass on the wooden arm of my cheap but durable Ikea couch. “I solved one of their little online puzzles.”

“Puzzles?” I am sitting in a matching arm chair, the bolts of which are in serious need of tightening. I am prevented from doing this by the fact that I have lost the hex key that fits, although I do have approximately 22 others that do not.

“Yeah,” she says. “Little cryptography exercises they sort of leave hiding in plain sight. I guess I solved one that nobody else had ever cracked before, so that caught their interest.”

“And by
they
you mean…”

“GDI.”

“Maybe you can explain this to me. If they’re this ultra-secret mega ultra-huge corporation that owns practically everything, why do they feel it necessary to have both the words Global
and
International in their name?”

She grinned. “That I don’t know.”

“I mean, it sounds a little…what’s the word? Redundant. If you’re global, doesn’t it kind of go without saying that you’re also international?”

“I think you’re getting hung up on the wrong things.”

“Sorry. Please continue. So you solved one of their little puzzles and…”

“They started watching me. After a while they approached me and started offering me little assignments here and there. Nothing huge. I think they wanted to see what I might be capable of doing.”

“Overthrow the occasional South American regime or African dictator? Stuff like that?”

“Not quite.”

“So where did we come in?” I realized that I had already finished my glass and so I topped it up. Violet was still nursing hers, but I added a few more drops for civility’s sake.

“That was my final assignment. They gave me a list of targets that had to be taken out with minimal collateral damage. I figured the Weather Station was the best way to do it. After a little snooping, I found that you two had been doing a lot of incriminating searches on the place. Trying to find out what it was for. How it was built.”

“You searched my computer?”

She nodded. “Easiest thing in the world. Your friend Max had a lot of porn on his. I mean, like, a
lot
. He really seems to have a thing for Asian teenage girls in police uniforms.”

I had no idea about this, although it does explain all those anime posters that were up on the walls in his bedroom. “Who doesn’t?”

“Don’t climb too high onto that horse, buddy boy. You seem to have quite an interest in nurses who bust out of their uniforms at a moment’s notice to perform impromptu urology exams.”

I felt my face turn bright red. “Um…”

“Although I suppose that is one way to determine genital health. If a penis can remain erect after twenty or so minutes of oral assault by a woman who can barely move her face otherwise after all that plastic surgery – including having her breasts swelled to the size of zeppelins and her labia majora reduced to look like a debit card slot – then maybe medical science should pay more attention.”

“Don’t give away the entire plot! I don’t think I saw the whole thing.”

“Spoiler alert! He ejaculates all over her face.”

“Oh, well, then. That saves me from sitting through the last five minutes or so.”

“I would ask you to explain the appeal, but I’d rather not know. The thought of thousands of sperm swimming into my tear ducts and attempting to fertilize my eyeballs fills me with something other than lust. Kind of the opposite of lust, actually. More like revulsion.”

“So, moving right along,” I said. “You found out we were doing that and decided to use us as your fall guys?”

“That was the plan. But then I guess GDI decided to avoid the exposure. That’s why they dropped in to redirect you into the JD.”

“I haven’t heard much from Max since then.”

“You probably won’t.”

“They certainly didn’t try to recruit me. My only skills were getting assaulted in the shower and shot in the nuts. Actually, that was by the same person.”

She looked genuinely concerned. “What happened?”

“Nothing of lasting import. The sound of running shower water has caused a couple of psychotic episodes. I try to bathe in the sink. It’s a double. More wine?”

She held out her glass, which I refilled. “For now, I’m going to assume that you’re joking.”

“Probably for the best. So anyway. You sell us into military service to land your dream job and then what?”

She puffed out her cheeks. “Then I went to work for them. That stuff with the Weather Station? Not even the pointy part at the top of the giant floating block of frozen water. You know how your friend was convinced that there was one giant company that ran everything? Well, they’re part of it.”

“By
it
, I take it that you’re referring to the giant but shadowy multinational conglomerate you work for.”

“They go back over a century. GDI is just one of the divisions. I don’t know what it was originally called. Now it’s HIG. I have to be careful how much snooping I do. They own the networks I’m logged on to and the software I’m using to search them. They’re overseen by an AI that borders on sentient. Damn thing almost knows what you’re thinking, never mind what you actually type.”

“So aside from controlling the weather and running the armed forces and most of the global economy, what else do they do?”

“Those Weather Stations are
everywhere
,” she said. “People think they’re for observation, but they’re not. The one you two knocked out is tiny in comparison to others. There’s one in Greenland that’s the size of Manhattan. They have others built on giant platforms at sea – like oil rigs, only ten times as big.”