The Anomaly(56)

My headache had settled into a sharp horizontal line between my temples. I saw some of the others screwing up their eyes, or rubbing them, and knew I wasn’t the only one suffering.

Ken and I shared another cigarette. After that, there were only seven left.

Pierre said he wanted to go shout out for Feather again. Gemma and Molly went with him. Gemma lurched as she stood, as if dizzy. All walked slowly. Listlessly.

Ken and I looked at each other, and Ken nodded.





Chapter

33



When the others had gone down the main passage, we poured the remaining couple of inches of water from my bottle into Ken’s, left it with the backpacks, and set off with one of the small lights. When we were halfway along the passage to the pool—and out of hearing range—Ken turned to me.

“So how are we going to do this?”

“I’ll be the guinea pig,” I said. “My stomach’s tough.”

“I doubt it’s seen the action that mine has.”

“I doubt anybody’s has. But I mean specifically when it comes to bugs. Years ago Kristy and I went on a cheap vacation in Ensenada. Too cheap. She lost eight pounds and spent three days in the bathroom, even though the motel and the nearest restaurant—both owned by the same guy—provided bottles of mineral water for guests. They made a huge deal about it. Then one evening I caught him filling them up from the rusty tap around the back of the motel. That I had previously seen being licked by a goat.”

“Arsehole. Not the goat. The guy.”

“I thought so, too. So on the last morning we stole the ice bucket, two blankets, a lamp, and every towel we could find. I’ve still got the lamp. But my point is my stomach was fine, though Kristy and I were literally sharing the same bottles. So I’ll have a few mouthfuls now. If there’s a problem, it generally takes a couple hours to show. Hopefully Feather will be back by then. If not, I’ll ask Gemma which room she used. And hope I don’t end up crapping my actual brains out.”

“There is that risk. But we’ve got to try it, right?”

“You saw how everyone’s looking. Hunger is uncomfortable. But like I said yesterday, lack of water will fuck us up fast. And not only physically. This situation is bad enough without people losing it or starting to imagine things.”

“You think that’s what happened with Gemma?”

“I don’t know. But it’ll start happening to all of us if we don’t find something to drink.”

Ken nodded. “Speaking of Kristy, how are things?”

Ken and I became acquainted when I was still married, in the year after I said farewell to the movie business. Like many farewells it wasn’t a clean break, and once in a while I got sucked back. One instance of this was an uncredited rewrite on a pilot for HBO, as a favor for a friend. Ken was being paid a consultancy fee to keep an eye on its young showrunner during preproduction, as a favor to a different friend, because the showrunner’s sole claim to expertise was being related by marriage to a senior exec. Ken’s role in the show was summarily curtailed after he punched out the showrunner one afternoon (and by God the entitled little prick deserved it), but by that point we’d started to grab an occasional beer together in the afternoon—and this eventually led to The Anomaly Files.

“There are no things,” I said.

“At all?”

“Brief email exchange a couple months ago.”

“Still a mystery to me,” Ken said.

“You know what happened.”

“I do. But you two were tight, Nolan. And it’s not like it was that big a deal in the general scheme of the shambling chaos of human relationships. I’m surprised you couldn’t bull through it, come out the other side battered and scarred but still on the same journey, all that New Age bollocks.”

“Yeah, well, we didn’t.”

“Sorry. Shouldn’t have brought it up. Still, makes a change from talking about diarrhea.”

“True. By the way—do you really hate this shirt?”

“’Course not. I’ve got a semi on, just looking at you.”

“How about you stop saying things, and we go find some water?”

“Right you are, squire.”



I’d had enough of being the leader for one morning, so I gave the light to Ken and he led the way down the narrower side passage. I’d had enough of being in darkness, too. After twenty-four hours—and it felt like a hell of a lot longer—it had ceased to be surprising. For better or worse, I adapt fast. If a ceiling light goes out, then within a day or two I live in a world where there was never a lightbulb there in the first place, to the utter exasperation of the few people who’ve tried to live with me. This felt different, not least because in here darkness was not merely a state of affairs but a statement. Light meant being out in the world. Dark meant we were not. The darkness said we were trapped.

We got to the end of the passage and squatted down at the lip over the pool. Ken held up the light so I could fill the bottle, but I didn’t even begin the process.

“Okay,” Ken said. He sounded very tired. “What the hell is going on now?”

The water was no longer even remotely clear. Where you could see it at all, it was brown and murky and looked like the kind of pestilential crap you would be drinking at your peril.