Some of the Philadelphia magazine staffers-you could tell by the colored name stickers-started a debate on how to help the poor man who seemed to have been shot in the head. One in particular started to poke around authoritatively. “Alright-move back, people. I know what I'm doing. Somebody call 911? Somebody call NOW, please!"
“Don't bother, pal,” said Kennedy. “We're toast. We've bitten the bag and squirted wet shit."
The magazine guy started foraging around in our jacket, and finally managed to fish a wallet from our jacket. He started flipping through my forged IDs, and finally settled on one-my fake driver's license. “Let's see here. Okay. Who are ya?” the man said to himself. “Hmm. Del Winter. Says you're a power company employee."
A woman piped up: “God, Tim, shouldn't we move him or something?"
“You can't,” said Tim. “You're likely to paralyze him. Now, we've got to keep the body still until the paramedics arrive. Speaking of, has somebody called 911 yet? I mean, for Pete's sake, our friend…” He looked at my ID again. “…our friend Del here is losing quarts by the second."
A bloody hand reached up and wrapped around the license. Tim's eyes widened. Brad was still alive, for the time being.
But perhaps he wasn't reaching for the license after all. I saw another face peek from behind the crowd of magazine staffers. It was Alison.
“She was shot,” I said, mostly thinking out loud more than anything else. “How can she stand there like that?"
“You seem to forget: she's been reborn into a cyborg body,” said Fieldman.
“A what?"
“Android, robot-whatever word you care to use. Surely, you know this. You arrived at the party inside her."
Indeed, I did know. Alison's lips trembled as she tried to move closer. Tim's bushy black hair obscured part of her face, but Alison's eyes remained transfixed. Her bright, blue eyes.
Oh God. Now I knew why Fieldman was acting smug.
“Brad, don't!” I shouted, even though I was nowhere near the lobby mike. “Don't do it!” Maybe my anguish would transmit through the pulpy brain and shattered skull into his consciousness. Either way, it wouldn't matter. Because Brad did it.
He jumped into Alison's body. He even looked right back down at us, and winked, with Alison's face.
I felt the conscious presence leave immediately. The house lights dimmed, as if there were a sudden power shortage somewhere else in the world, and electricity was being sucked away to be shared elsewhere. The lobby screen went blank.
“I'll be with you always,” Fieldman said apropos of nothing, and vanished from our sight.
Leaving the rest of us inside our dying body.
Remember how I was complaining about being trapped in a toilet? A fate worse than death, right?
I was wrong. There is something worse.
The moment Fieldman vanished, the metal gizmo that had affixed me to the floor vanished, too. I was a free man. Wowee. A free man, trapped in a soon-to-be corpse.
Kevin Kennedy slapped me on my soul-shoulder. “I guess this brings the case to a close, doesn't it, buddy? I always knew somebody would get the better of you. Hell, this is the happiest day of my life. Or should I say death?"
“Nobody's dying,” I said. “I mean, not permanently."
I couldn't have picked a worse time to say those words, for the Brain Hotel chose that moment to start to collapse. It started in the uppermost floors, where a few of the more solitary souls resided: a loud, thunderous rumbling, like God bowling in an empty dancehall. Then it became louder and louder, as if each floor were collapsing and falling down on the next, and so on. For all I knew, it was.
“Come, Father Death, come!” Kennedy was shouting.
But it wasn't Kennedy who got it first. A large chunk of ceiling exploded right above a group of souls gathered by the doorway-including Doug and Old Tom. Then, to rub salt into the wound, the floor beneath them erupted upwards a second later. I could only assume that everything-plaster, bricks, souls-met halfway, violently. Hopefully, the stoner bastard never knew what hit him.
I bolted for the stairway. The booming from above pounded closer and closer. I quickly decided the stairs were not an ideal escape route. I spun, and the wall I was now facing shattered into a million pieces, flying debris cutting Kevin Kennedy into an equal number of individual pieces. I tucked myself into a ball on the lobby carpet, waiting for something to rip me apart, too. The only mystery was the direction.
I heard plenty of explosions, but nothing so much as a flying brick touched me.
After a minute or so, I dared to stand up and look. I was still standing on a patch of the lobby carpet, but the carpet was positioned in the middle of a vast field of green, reaching into the distance. No debris, no bodies. Then again, souls didn't have bodies, I supposed. Just astral perceptions of bodies. Every last astral perception, it seemed, had been blown to smithereens.
The Brain Hotel was gone. But what was this surrounding me? I'd never built any kind of landscape around the hotel. I was never a big fan of mowing lawns, Brain-conjured or not.
There was more, too-another hotel complex a mile away, across a green field-a superhotel, the Las Vegas variety. Behind it, the fields rolled outward into a blue infinity, occasionally interrupted by patches of gold lines and other, hotel-like structures. The more I stared, the more I could make out another piece of land, across the blue infinity. An island. Where the hell was I?
“I was wondering when you'd arrive,” a voice said. I snapped my head around. It was Paul After.
“Brad told me you were dead,” I said.
“I've been dead as long as you've known me."
Even I was getting tired of the dead cracks. “Do you know where we are?"
Paul puffed up his chest, and started to look around, as if he were a tour guide. “The best I can figure is that this is the place between death and whatever lies beyond it. I'm not even sure how long I've been here. Do you know?"
“Not too long. I think it's been about a day since Brad told me he offed you."
“Oh. Right.” Paul's eyebrows furrowed. “Brad was pretty pissed. Of course, he had every reason to be."
“So you knew you were one and the same?"
“No, no,” Paul insisted. “I never lied to you. I didn't realize who I was until I was sent to this place. It gave me a sense of clarity I've never felt before. That's when I realized I was-am-nothing more than an invented personality. I was John Paul Bafoures, criminal mastermind, and Brad was the normal, upright, tax-paying citizen. It was brilliant. Most killers invent a cover, some ordinary boring life, to avoid detection; Brad Larsen actually lived it. I was the aberration."
“He made you up?"
Yep,” Paul said. “And I finally remembered what I did to piss him off."
“Spit in his Cheerios one morning?"
“Last July, Brad decided to turn himself into the Witness Protection Program-to protect Alison, and start over, with a clean slate, I presume. Or maybe start up business someplace else. He decided to erase me, pretend I didn't exist. Naturally, this didn't make me happy. So I sent an order to have him killed."
“You what? But you were Brad."
“No, I was part of Brad. A distinct personality within his own. I wanted revenge. Don't forget-I was a ruthless, bloodthirsty killer. Brad made me that way."
“How did you pull it off?"
“One night, when Brad was sleeping, I took over his body, and made a quick phone call to Las Vegas. Asked an associate of ours to arrange a quick assassination. I suppose he picked this Ray Loogan guy-an absolute nobody."
“Then why was the paycheck half a million?” I asked.