Twist

by

Myron Night

Chapter 1

I woke up screaming, my arms spinning like the blades of a fan, trying to push the dream away. That same dream. My heart pounded. I had fallen asleep at my desk again. I looked around the office, focusing on the details, to bring myself back to reality. Sure, I knew every crack and stain on the walls of that crappy office like I knew my own name, but it was better than thinking about the dream.

The fly-specked, pitted walls, the bruised acoustical ceiling tiles, and the matted carpet the color of used chewing gum. Yeah. It was all there.

I pressed my palms down on the scarred green surface of the desk and forced myself to focus and breathe slowly.

It was an ancient oak desk, from the office of an old-time public school. The top was covered with a green material like linoleum, the way they made them in those days. The desk was beat to hell, but substantial. It weighed as much as a small automobile. It was a comfort to me, like a grandfather. Besides, it had some real value, since there wasn’t that much oak around anymore.

I rocked back gently in the swivel chair, just to remind myself that I was sitting in it. It creaked slightly, a familiar sound, a good sound, like your dog sighing when you touched him behind the ears. If you had a dog.

The chair was of the same yellowed oak as the desk, with a slatted back, sturdy arms and rollers on the bottom. It cupped me like a large, muscular hand. On the other side of the desk were two straight-backed oak chairs. They were for my clients.

Not that I had many clients.

I scanned the reversed black letters on the inside of the frosted glass door:

ADAM TWIST

PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS

The words were silhouetted against the pale fluorescent light of the hallway. My shakes started to go away. So, the office was a rat-hole in the shadow of The Wall--so, I ate dog food out of the can and slept with my head down on my desk--so what? Every man has got to have something all his own, or he isn’t a man. That bug-infested office was it for me.

I was sweating, but not just from the dream. Even though it was early and the sun had just come up, the office was already hot. Outside the window, the sunlight stabbed at the rooftops. It was going to be another real scorcher.

I let my eyes wander to the big calendar on the wall, over the worn black leather sofa beside the door. The calendar was cheap, the kind merchants give away for promo purposes. July, 2034. The name of a store that sold things to protect people from sunlight and air pollution. The address was right here in Wichita. I’d been to the store. But it was the woman on the calendar that got me.

She was a hologram. She wore a wrapper that covered her entire body, shapeless, except where the lightweight fabric draped in pleats from her prominent nipples. Islamic fashion had become all the rage in the last few years, and there was more to it than just protection from the sun. Those crafty old Arabs really had something; seeing less instead of more was a definite turn-on. Her face was hidden by a stylish respirator, but from behind clear plastic, her green eyes smoldered.

Some things never change.

“Mornin’, darlin’,” I said.

“Good morning, Bob.”

Her voice was gentle and soothing, the way a woman sounded after you’d had a great night together, and done all those important little things just right. She’d been there when I moved into the office. Too bad she’d been programmed for some guy named Bob.

“Today is Wednesday, July 17, 2034. It is 8:35 A.M.”

The sound of her voice made me feel better.

I glanced out the small, dirty window. The sunlight was like a knife blade slicing along the top of The Wall. My office was south of Osage Park, about as close to The Wall as you could get and still be INside. Not a prestige address, but worlds better than being OUTside. I knew that. I’d been OUTside, and I never wanted to go back.

The Wall. Built by Montrose, around the year 2010, during the Great Migration, it completely surrounded the old city of Wichita. Built to keep out the hordes fleeing the rising seas. Who told us there was no such thing as global warming? Bye-bye L.A. Bye-bye New York, San Francisco, Miami--all the coastal cities gone, and the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi Valley right to our front door. If only I’d had a crystal ball, I could’ve bought lots of oceanfront property right here in Wichita. Then I’d be living in a castle, richer than sin, like Montrose, instead of this rat-hole office.... Look, it’s simple: INside the Wall is a country club; OUTside the Wall is Calcutta.

“The temperature is thirty-five degrees Celsius.” Her voice was smooth and sultry. “The wind is blowing at a speed of twenty-eight miles per hour from the northwest. The sky is not clear.”

I still needed something to steady my nerves, so I opened the safe under the desk, hauled out the battered espresso maker and plugged it in. Making coffee required real progress, since I actually had to get up out of my chair and go to the bar sink in the corner for the water.

You’re wondering if I ever peed in the sink, living alone as I did in that room, but I protest. I decline to answer. A man has a right to some privacy.

I sat back down in my chair and poured the water into the top of the espresso maker.

“Ozone alerts continue. The ultra-violet index exceeds ninety-two percent, and sunscreen levels of sixty-five or higher are strongly recommended.”

As the little machine built up a head of steam, the aroma of the bean teased my nostrils. It was the good Columbian stuff, black market and expensive. I inhaled pleasurably. The good stuff was hard to get. The embargo against trade with the Latins had landed coffee on the same list as cocaine and bananas. I suppose the movers and shakers, who understood that sort of thing, didn’t want our cash heading south. Too bad I wasn’t a pothead--you could get as much of that as you wanted.

I looked out the window and stared at the blank face of The Wall. Its surface had been formed by some heat-fusing process that gave it a metallic, glassy blue-grey sheen, as slippery as glass and nearly indestructible.

“There are cyclone warnings, with the probability of a major tornado event increasing to sixty-three per cent.” We had screwed up the weather in almost every imaginable way, but the tornadoes were the worst. I hated the tornadoes.

The dream is always the same. I am walking down an aisle carrying a girl in my arms. There are crowds of people on both sides of the aisle, watching me. Their mouths are open as though they are shouting or singing, but I cannot hear them. All I can hear is the howling of the wind.

The girl in my arms changes. Sometimes she is an innocent child staring at me; sometimes she is injured and bloody; sometimes she weeps; sometimes she is dead; sometimes she is naked and sexy, and writhes in my arms like a snake about to bite. This last one is the worst.

Then I reach the bottom of the aisle and there is an altar. On the altar is the spinning shaft of a tornado, a sick yellow color, or dirty grey, like used motor oil. I am supposed to lay the girl on the altar, give her up to the whirlwind. I am supposed to keep my eyes down, like in church, but I cannot. It’s always the same. I have to look. I look up, up, up the gleaming, spinning shaft of the tornado to the top, and there is no roof above me but only the sky filled with the swollen head of the thundering whirlwind, bigger than God, spinning sickly out of control. That is when I start screaming and wake up....

“The current air pollution density of one hundred and twenty-five is a new record high.”

Yes, the weather was getting more vicious, hostile and unpredictable all the time. We had been warned: ozone depletion, pollution, deforestation, and all that. But talking about it is one thing; trying to live with it is something else.

My hands shook as I lifted the cup of delicious black liquid from the hissing espresso maker and took a slug of the double shot. I set the cup on the desk and looked out the window at the emptiness of The Wall. It was soothing to watch, like a blank tv screen. I waited for the bean to take effect.

A movement caught my eye. I spun around in the chair.

There were shadows in the hallway behind the frosted glass.

“There is someone at the door, Bob.”

“Shut up.”

“Yes, Bob.”

I quickly slipped the coffee makings back into the safe. It was a little early in the day for a client, but I didn’t want to get caught with illegal drug paraphernalia on my desk. Might be bad for business. Not that there was any business.

I snuck the top right desk drawer open so I could grab my pistol fast if I needed it.

Then the door exploded inward and the glass shattered into a million fragments, with the broad-shouldered lads who had kicked it in following close behind.

I just had time to slam the safe shut and spin the dial before they swarmed across the desk and hit me. The oak swivel chair toppled over backwards and I crashed to the floor beneath them. They wore the full body armor of the City Police and they felt like giant insects crawling over my body.

I fought them. A thought ran wildly through my brain, that it was a shame, them breaking the pretty glass with my name on it, since the door was unlocked anyway. Then something came down hard on my head and the lights went out.