Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,54
West Fiftieth, it’s raining harder, the cloud deck lowering. He’s confident the hotel was on Fiftieth, and he’s pretty sure he headed east.
He keeps catching glimpses of the two bases of the Big Bend, luminous in the rain. The curve is hidden in the clouds a couple thousand feet above.
He’s trying not to think of Meghan in this moment, because when he does, he crumbles all over again, and he needs to be strong, needs his wits about him.
Cold and so tired, he’s beginning to wonder if perhaps he walked west that night, instead of east, when a red neon sign in the distance catches his attention.
McLachlan’s Restaurant
Breakfast
Lunch
Dinner
Open 7 Days
24 Hours
Barry moves toward the sign until he’s standing under it, watching the rain fall through the red illumination.
He picks up his pace.
Past the bodega, which he remembers, and then the liquor store, a women’s clothing store, a bank—all closed—until, near the end of the block, he stops at the entrance to the dark driveway, which slopes down into the subterranean space beneath a neo-gothic building, wedged between two higher skyscrapers.
If he walked down that driveway, he’d arrive at a garage door built of reinforced steel.
This is how he entered Hotel Memory all those years ago.
He’s absolutely sure of it.
There’s a part of him that wants to run down there, charge through, and shoot every fucking person he sees inside that hotel, ending with the man who put him in the chair. Meghan’s brain broke because of him. She is dead because of him. Hotel Memory needs to end.
But that would most likely only get him killed.
No, he’ll call Gwen instead, propose an off-the-books, under-the-radar op with a handful of SWAT colleagues. If she insists, he’ll take an affidavit to a judge. They’ll cut power to the building, go in with night-vision gear, do a floor-to-floor sweep.
Clearly, some minds, like Meghan’s, cannot handle the changing of their reality, and the collateral damage is also tragic—in addition to his daughter, three people died in her building from the fire, and over the radio on his drive to Penn Station, he heard more reports of people—unbalanced by the appearance of the Big Bend—wreaking havoc in the city.
Healthy minds are being made unwell; unwell minds are being driven over the edge.
He pulls out his phone, opens contacts, scrolls to the g’s.
As his finger hovers over Gwen, someone shouts his name.
He glances across the street, sees someone running toward him.
A woman’s voice yells, “Don’t make that call!”
He’s already reaching into his jacket, thumbing off the button to his shoulder holster, getting a solid grip on his subcompact Glock, thinking she probably works for whoever built the chair, which means—fuck!—they know he’s scoping the building.
“Barry, don’t shoot, please.”
She slows to a walk, raises her hands.
They’re open, empty.
She approaches cautiously, barely five feet tall, wearing boots and a black leather jacket beaded with raindrops. A shock of red hair comes to her chin, but it’s damp. She’s been waiting for him in the rain. The thing that disarms him is the kindness in her green eyes, and something else, which strikes him—oddly—as familiarity.
She says, “I know you were sent back into the worst memory of your life. The man who did that is Marcus Slade. He owns that building. And I know what just happened to Meghan. I’m so sorry, Barry. I know you want to do something about it.”
“You work for them?”
“No.”
“Are you a mind reader?”
“No.”
“Then how could you possibly know what happened to me?”
“You told me.”
“I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
“You told me in the future, four months from now.”
He lowers the pistol, his brain twisting itself in knots. “You used that chair?”
She looks up into his eyes with an intensity that sends a cool electricity down his spine. “I invented the chair.”
“Who are you?”
“Helena Smith, and if you go into Slade’s building with Gwen, it will lead to the end of everything.”
Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.
—RAY CUMMINGS
BARRY
November 6, 2018
The woman with fiery hair takes Barry by the arm and pulls him down the sidewalk, away from the entrance to the subterranean garage.
“We’re not safe here,” she says. “Let’s walk to your car. Penn Station, right?”
Barry pulls his arm away from her and starts moving in the opposite direction.
She calls after him, “Standing on the driveway of your home in Portland, watching a total solar eclipse with your father. Spending summers with your grandparents at their farmhouse in New Hampshire. You’d sit in the apple orchard