Hopper House (The Jenkins Cycle Book 3) (12 page)

I
t took
ten minutes to labor Stephen, shrouded in linen, into the back of the car. My head was swimming by this point, so I didn’t bother cleaning up the mess of blood on the bed. Wasn’t my house.

As an afterthought, I grabbed my trusty hammer and destroyed the camera facing the front door. Then I went through the place busting holes in the walls and smashing mirrors. This was no senseless act of petulant vandalism. The landlord wouldn’t risk sending a repair company out. He had to fix it personally, and whatever kept him busy, I figured, the better. Also, I was feeling petulant and in need of something to break.

Before leaving, I grabbed Trevor’s wallet from his old clothes. Then I drove toward Seattle and kept driving until I found a police car on the side of the road with a mounted radar gun.

Speed traps are a special type of evil secretly disguised as good. They always catch us when we're in a hurry to be somewhere. Then we act polite and friendly and thank the officer when he tells us how awful we were for not seeing that sign back there, and
I’ll sure be careful next time.
Never helps us get out of a ticket, but we do it anyway. I still smarted from the ticket in Savannah, and I was in a rotten mood. Yes, it was childish, and the poor cop probably had a quota to fill to keep his job, but
just following orders
was a fascist excuse for criminalizing punctuality.

I rear-ended the cruiser at about ten miles an hour—a speed I judged to be annoying yet not life threatening, especially if the cop was wearing a seatbelt.

The way I saw it, after everything I’d been though, I had to have
some
fun this trip—which is why I’d swallowed two more painkillers before leaving.

I was already out of the car when the cop leapt from his. He was too slow, though.

“Get on the ground!” I shouted, training my gun on him.

“Don’t shoot!” the cop yelled and fell to his knees.

I shouted again and he dropped to his belly, head raised, watching me with a terrified expression.

Casually, I reached down and removed his handcuffs, keeping my gun pointed at him while traffic whizzed by. I caught the shocked expression of a trucker and figured he was already telling everyone what he’d just seen.

Then, in that moment, I had a wonderfully fun idea.

“You stay there or I’ll shoot you, okay?”

“You won’t get away with this,” the cop said.

Glaring at him, I said, “You’re not going to write me a ticket, are you?”

He didn’t reply.

I sat in the car, grabbed the CB handset, and pushed the little button. “Breaker breaker one nine, hound dog ten Mississippi—
chhch!
Gotcher ears on? Come on good buddy, roger wilco, over and out—
chhch!
” I waited a second, then added, “Hakuna matata, quid pro quo, Daisy Duke, over—
chhch!
”

Suddenly, the cop made a move for his gun. I fired a warning shot and flinched when the bullet shattered the window.

The officer screamed and threw his hands out in front of him. “I’m not moving! I’m not moving!”

I clicked the handset again and said, “
chhch!”
then went back to the prone cop. I considered disarming him, but didn’t trust my dexterity or speed.

“You’re that bank robber, aren’t you?” he said. “Where’s your friend? The shooter?”

“Dead in the back seat. I’m turning myself in.”

“What the … then what are you shooting for? Why can’t I get up?”

“Because,” I said, “I’m turning myself in
with flair.
”

I slipped the cuffs over both my wrists—behind my back, the way cops liked it—then walked in front of him and dropped the gun.

Because I thought it’d be funny, I said, “Just stay put and nobody gets hurt.”

The officer’s mouth fell open. His gaze bounced rapidly from the gun to me and back again, as if sensing some trick. Then he lurched to his feet, tackled me to the ground, and flipped me onto my stomach. I’m pretty sure he went looking for his cuffs—force of habit—then realized I was wearing them.

“What the hell?” he said. “Are you crazy or something?”

In my best Pepé Le Pew, I said, “
Crazy like a fool in love, no?
”

The officer hauled me to my feet and slammed me hard against the car, then proceeded to frisk me.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” he said. “Pull a gun on me? Shoot my car?”

“Don’t forget the robbery,” I said, giggling a little. My head felt like a moon bounce filled with nitrous oxide.

“You stay right there, dammit.”

He reached into his car and called for backup. Then he crept over to Stephen’s car.

“Aw, Jesus,” he said when he looked in the back seat. Had to be seepage from the wound, leaking through the white sheet.

Try as I might, I simply couldn’t stop giggling. The cop returned and sat me in the back of the police car, then shut the door.

I hate police cars. They don’t have cushions. Just a lot of hard, smooth vinyl for easy cleaning, and they’re always cramped—like a medieval torture cage where you can never get comfortable. Come to think of it, I hated medieval torture cages, too. And broccoli, and
Punky Brewster
, and Pac-Man on the Atari, and Atari in general.

Through the glass, I shouted, “They never made a cage that could hold Jackrabbit Jenkins!”

The cop stared at me, shook his head, and waited for backup. Then it was off to jail for another frisk, fingerprinting, and interrogation about the bank robberies.

Though the drugs were wearing off, in a nod to Trevor’s affliction, I made sure to act a little crazy. I told them Stephen had planned the whole thing, that he later overdosed on something, and that I’d shot his dead corpse because it kept talking to me. I also confessed to the murder of the Mormon missionary and the invention of the pogo stick.

Being accused of mass murder has its perks—they don’t put you with the general population, and you get round-the-clock surveillance in case you try to hang yourself with your underwear. You also get meals in the morning and in the evening, or whenever the clerk gets to it. It’s never tasty. Prison has tasty food—especially federal prison. County jails, not so much.

Jails are also quite loud. People yell and keep you awake when you want to sleep. Others practice their singing off the echoey walls. I needed silence for what I wanted to try, but held off until the staff turned off the lights for the night. Even then, it took a while for the place to quiet down.

Then, for the second time ever, I made my case to the Great Whomever:

“Hey there, you big fat mystery in the sky,” I said. “I’m not sure if you’re an alien, a Babylonian god, or a subatomic particle from the ass of Stephen Hawking. Don’t much care, either. I
do
know you can get me out of this body, like you did back at Lana Sandway’s sexy torture mansion. I threatened you that time, and I apologize for that. Of
course
I’ll keep coming back—you’re the only show in town, bro. But I have a favor to ask, and my need is great.”

The Great Whomever didn’t reply.

I nodded. “That’s what I thought you’d say. But I need out of this body, and I don’t want to kill him to do it or wait floating in spectral goofy juice. Please note that I haven’t leveled a single threat. Not like last time.”

Last time, the Great Whomever had forced me to die a thousand and one deaths before kicking me into a nearby body. I took it to mean he didn’t like my threat about never taking another portal.

“If you can get me in the same room with the landlord,” I said, “I’ll never complain to you again. Ready, set,
go!
”

Like a boy waiting for a school bus, I sat on my concrete bench and foam pad and waited for my three little kicks to gently fling me on my way. Considering how polite I’d been, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the Great Whomever punted me into the landlord himself.

“I don’t mean to sound greedy,” I said in the general direction of the ceiling. “Because greed’s a sin. And nobody hates sin worse than you. Stephen was a huge sinner. Not like me. He was into it all: drugs, casual sex, murder, and he ate with his elbows on the table. I never eat with my elbows on the table. Ready, set,
go!
”

I didn’t go
.

More time passed and still nothing happened. Someone in a nearby cell started singing
Blue Moon
in an exceedingly awful voice, prompting the other prisoners to yell at him to shut the hell up. He didn’t shut the hell up—not until he finished the song. To my thinking it had to be a sin, keeping people awake.

“You know what else is a sin?” I said quietly. “Leaving me in this cell when people are in danger—now do what I say, goddammit, and
send me where I need to go!
”

Immediately I regretted my tone. Just as I was about to yell how sorry I was, I felt a sting. Not a kick, like I’d hoped for. More antiseptic than that. Like a prick on the finger at the doctor’s office, except in my head somewhere. I was also lightheaded, and my upper lip felt cold. I touched it and my fingers came away slippery wet. The main lights were off, but the safety lights were on. Brighter near the sink. I stumbled over and saw my fingers were red.

I licked my lip. Blood, all right.

“What the…?”

Now my chin and neck were cold. I felt lightheaded and dizzy. More blood and lots of it, from the mother of all nosebleeds.

“Help…” I said weakly, and fell to the floor.

My hands went numb. Feet too. The main lights came on and I shut my eyes against the glare. The last thing I heard was my cell door rattling open.

Then the world turned gray.

I
was somewhere all right
, but not the Great Wherever. That aside, there were similarities: I didn’t have a body, and I still couldn’t feel or smell or hear.

But I could
see
. Not in one direction, either, but everywhere at once—up, down, right, left, and all the little places in-between.

Not that there was much to look at: grayish nothingness so uniformly consistent there was no way to tell how far it went. It floated around me like an enormous all-encompassing fog bank.

The
Gray
Wherever…?

Time passed, and nothing in the slightest happened. At first I was fine with that, because everything was new. Something different to think about. Maybe I was in the anteroom to Heaven? That’d be great.

But then
more
time passed … and I started to get bored. Endless grayness will do that to you. Worse, I began to seriously miss my old and dented Great Wherever. The fact that nothing had changed but the paint job was both astonishing and no big whoop at the same time. A new dynamic in the lather-rinse-repeat cycle of my existence, but all they’d done was switched shampoos on me.

Nothingness, I discovered, was far easier to deal with than the water-torture grayness I was staring into.

If I could just shut it out…

To divert my attention, I thought about Stephen, replaying his every word and gesture, searching for some clue that might have tipped me to the impending massacre. The truth was he’d played me like a fiddle.

In time, my thoughts returned to Trevor. I hoped he was all right, but deep down knew he wasn’t. He’d paid the ultimate price because the Great Whomever hated sass-talk.

And the world stayed gray.

J
ust when I
thought I might mentally crack, things began to change. Slowly at first—a flash of movement here and there. When I focused my attention on it, all I saw was the same blank grayness as before. Then it would happen again.

I’m drifting.

I couldn’t say how I knew this, only that it was true.

What felt like days passed, drifting along like that. Other than contributing to my boredom, the perceived time didn’t matter. I’d learned long ago not to worry about time in the
old
Wherever, and figured the same applied here.

The landlord’s threat weighed heavily on my mind. Though I wasn’t convinced he’d hurt my mother if I didn’t pay, I couldn’t gamble her life to find out. Not that I could do anything, floating along in my new digs. Increasingly, I worried the rules were different here—that no portal would come to take me to a ride.

In more time, I sensed something hidden in the Gray Wherever, insinuating itself at the edge of my perception … and it was
big—
mind-numbingly vast, and incredibly old. All this came instinctively, integrated seamlessly into the substrate of my consciousness.

Okay, I’ll bite.

Treating the thing in the nether like a portal, I mentally reached for it.

Unlike my experiences with those odd doorways that carry me to my rides, reaching out simply pulled me closer to the thing. The harder I thought about it, the faster I drifted. Then faster and faster, really flying now. I worried I’d fly right past it, but then it pulled into view and my motion slowed to a crawl.

In more detail than a high-definition movie, I witnessed the incredible, relentless beauty of it: a ribbon of inky darkness, celestial in scale, like something from a Hubble Telescope picture. A
familiar
darkness. I’d seen it before—blazing from Rose’s eyes when she came into the world at that lawyer meeting, and later when she got kicked in her living room.

On closer inspection, it came to resemble an infected wound. It branched and twisted jaggedly and randomly in all directions, arching so far into the grayness my vision eventually failed. Along the smaller branches, I saw countless gossamer-thin strands of that same blackness connected to it. Each of those also stretched into the gray and disappeared.

Curious, I zoomed along one and followed it for a while. The thread kept going with no sign of stopping, replacing my unease of everything I’d seen with the teensiest tinge of my previous boredom. Eventually, I turned around and came back.

Upon my arrival, I saw movement along the artery closest to me. Flying in close, I witnessed snakelike creatures formed from the same darkness dipping in and out of the structure, swirling and cavorting like children playing at the community pool. Though thin like a hose, they were incredibly long—think miles, not feet—and marginally thicker at the end where you’d expect to find a head. Nearest the infection, they narrowed to the thickness of the infini-threads, lost their distinctiveness, and merged with the structure.

Again, I pulled closer. Maybe they were friendly?

As if alerted to my presence, the creatures ceased their cavorting and headed my way. Where before I’d seen maybe a hundred of the things, thousands more suddenly sprang up. Tens of thousands now, hurtling toward me, their bodies lengthening as if drawn from spools.

I don’t know how I did it, but I recoiled away and huddled into myself so as to appear smaller. Beyond me, the necrotic wound in the grayness spanned gigantically, eternally.

Though I still sensed the creatures, I did so as if looking through eyes squinted to the tiniest of slits. The coordination of their chase fell apart as they darted this way and that in search of their hidden quarry, eventually coming to resemble their original playful behavior. It could be they were never after me at all, and their game had simply moved in my direction. Maybe I’d overreacted.

So, of course, I had to peek out and check.

As one, the creatures flew my way again, fresh on the scent and impossible to stop. They weren’t friendly at all—they lashed themselves to me like leeches.

Instinctively, I pulled away, and experienced something like pain but so much worse. Raw, searing, agony flared through the totality of being that was Dan Jenkins, and the memory of a trip to the store with my mother was sliced off like something healthy and pink under a surgeon’s knife. Not the entire memory—I knew I’d gone to the store with her that day, just not what she’d purchased, what aisles we’d gone down, or what the people we encountered looked like.

Another creature attached to me, and two more after that. Terrible pain, again, seared through me when I tore free, taking with it the name of my second grade teacher as if I’d never known it to begin with.

The more I tried to escape, the more the snake things tore at me, and the more I forgot: the color of my first car, the periodic table, a few pages from a chapter of a favorite book, my locker combination in high school, running with my dog on a summer day, and the name of the guy who sailed the ocean blue in 1492. Not just single memories, either. Whole groups of related memories vanished as well: every song by Led Zeppelin, every birthday I’d known or heard of, my email username and password and the site that hosted it, and everything that happened in February 1988.

Mindlessly, I thrashed. More pain, more lost memories. And with every torturous bite I became a little less
there
than before. With nowhere to run, I reached into myself, holding fast to that thing called
Daniel
as the destructive creatures frenzied, slashed, and bit me apart. Then, as if the situation wasn’t bad enough, the ones I couldn’t shake off began pulling me toward the infection.

Help!
I mentally called out—I suppose to the Great Whomever. Any port in a storm.

In response, I sensed a sudden change in the firmament. On a level out of phase with the fury and confusion of the attack, I detected the presence of new entities in the nether, wheeling around my consciousness like birds. Then I saw them: winged beings with intelligent faces, like the ones in that weird dream from my childhood where angels protected me and tormented the wicked. Thousands of them, now, whirling around the horrible wound.

Help!
I called again.

The beings had tethers attached to them resembling the infini-threads. But these weren’t dark—they blazed with light. When the snakes launched another attack on me, the winged beings slashed them apart with suddenly materialized swords, scattering them in puffs of smoke.

Faster than thought, they whirled around me in a cloud of shining white death, killing snakes by the thousands.

When the majority of snakes had either died or retreated, the beings lined up between me and the main mass of darkness. Then one of them—female in form—looped me with her thread and gave it a tug. Rather than bounce off her, I fell through her body like a ghost and proceeded to fall through the thousands behind her.

The change was almost immediate. The grayness disappeared, and walls of nothingness sprang up around me, turning the Gray Wherever back into the
Great
Wherever. I couldn’t see anymore, and I honestly couldn’t have been happier.

Somewhere in the void, a portal appeared. This one with that strange sense of limitation around it leading to a good guy.

Any port in a storm.

I reached.

M
y hand felt numb
. I was gripping a frozen cardboard can.

“Orange juice,” I said, feeling a bit dazed.

I put it in the giant bin in front of me with what looked like a hundred more, on sale two for a dollar. Five boxes of orange juice were stacked on a dolly beside me with a pile of broken down boxes next to it.

“What the
hell
was that?” I said, probing the holes in my once perfect memory like a tongue after a missing tooth.

Even though I still remembered the vast majority of my past experiences with supernatural perfection, it felt terrible having lost any at all. Imagine waking up knowing you owned a tennis racket, but not knowing what one looked like. Holes like that gaped everywhere in my mind.

“Sandra,” I said.

My ex-girlfriend. I knew everything about her but what she looked like. I knew she was beautiful, but beyond that I drew a blank. Physically, she may as well have been a stranger.

The Great Whomever was getting more insistent about the rules. I wondered if other hoppers knew they could force themselves out. Rose and Stephen had seemed almost as clueless as me about the hopper condition. Maybe they’d tried jumping out but failed and never tried again. Or maybe their heart hadn’t been in it. The first time it happened to me, I’d threatened the Great Whomever. Kicking sideways hadn’t worked
this
time until I’d yelled at him. Would Rose threaten something she thought was a superior alien intelligence? Would Stephen care enough about anyone to even try?

I hated that I’d possibly killed Trevor. He may have been a violent murderer, but he was also the proud owner of Boardwalk and Park Place. Being crazy like that had to get him some reprieve in the afterlife, didn’t it?

Remembering Trevor’s faux credit cards, I reached in my back pocket and pulled out a wallet.

“Hey, George,” someone called. A woman in her forties with fried blond hair. “You going on break soon?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

That was a good question. “Not tired enough?”

She snorted derisively. “Trying to go home early?”

I narrowed my eyes: this lady was good. “Maybe…”

“Well, I’m taking my break,” she said, sounding faintly irritated, then walked away.

With everyone’s break time straightened out, I opened the wallet for a look. Credit cards, no cash at all, and based on his birthday, he was thirty-eight years old. Well, provided more than four months hadn’t passed.

“George Connolly,” I said, reading his license.

Like Trevor, George lived in Seattle. Distance-wise, not a very big hop this time. The one time I’d jumped laterally had landed me in an evil henchman named Brian. Now I was George, the food stocker.

George wasn’t carrying a cellphone, but he did have a watch that showed the date. Only a few minutes had passed since kicking from that jail cell. It was now 11:28 p.m. Yet another similarity—my first lateral jump had also happened minutes apart.

If I could borrow a phone or use the store landline, I could call the minister. A sensible plan, but I held off for two reasons. One, the frozen orange juice wouldn’t stock itself, and I didn’t want George blamed for ruining merchandise.

The second reason was more troubling. I’d forgotten the minister’s phone number.