The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man Read online

“Sure, why not? Give me a few minutes and I’ll make the arrangements.” And with that he was on his feet again and wandering towards the kitchen, phone in hand. Alex sat dumbly with the brochure open in his lap, wondering why he hadn’t had the wit to nail a sheet of plywood over his mailbox.

  NIGHT WAS FALLING as the jet made its final approach to Sioux Crossing. Down below, the land was already in darkness, a great emptiness of farmland divided up by roads like a sheet of graph paper. Alex had managed to get some sleep, and he’d missed the Rockies.

  Back on the ground, they taxied for ten minutes or so before coming to a stop in a complex of brightly lit hangars. Alex undid his seatbelt and stretched his legs out in front of him. In the past eighteen hours or so he had flown all the way across the country and halfway back again. He felt tired and achy and sweaty and his clothes were beginning to smell.

  The door at the front of the cabin opened and the copilot stepped out of the flight deck. “All ready, Mr Dolan?” he asked. He looked neat and clean and well-rested and cheerful.

  “Yes,” said Alex, clambering to his feet and picking up his overnight bag. “All ready.”

  Outside, a grey SUV was parked on the concrete, a tall man wearing jeans and a Megadeth tee shirt standing beside it. There was no sign of anyone else, so Alex walked over to him.

  He met him halfway, hand outstretched. “Mr Dolan? Danny Hofstadter. Welcome to Sioux Crossing.”

  They shook hands. “Thank you. I think.” Close up, he smelled like someone who had, until an hour or so ago, been hosting a family barbecue.

  “Can I take your bag for you?” Hofstadter asked as they began to walk towards the SUV.

  “No, I’m good, thanks.” The bag contained a single change of clothes, a shaving bag, a bottle of water, and a couple of trashy novels Alex had picked up at Logan when he’d left that morning. Hofstadter opened one of the rear passenger doors and Alex slung the bag inside, closed the door, and went to sit up front.

  “This your first time in Iowa?” Hofstadter asked, putting the car into drive and pulling away from the hangars.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. Where are we going?”

  Hofstadter glanced at him. He looked a couple of years older than Alex, which put him in his late forties, but he was in far better shape. His hair was buzzed down to a mousy fuzz, and his biceps bulged from the sleeves of his tee shirt. He looked like a farmer who moonlighted as a taxi service. “I’m going to take you to your hotel,” he said. “I guess you’re tired.”

  “It’s been a long day,” Alex agreed.

  “Well, the rest of it’s your own. What’s left of it.” He pulled the car to a stop at a gate in a high chain-link fence. A man in a uniform was standing beside a kiosk; Danny flashed a card at him, the guard reached into the kiosk and fiddled with something, and the gate started to roll aside. The guard sketched a salute as they drove through, which was a first for Alex.

  They drove away from the airport along a road which seemed to Alex far too wide and smooth for a county road. He’d been on state highways that were in worse condition. It was also virtually empty, with just the occasional car or truck passing in the other direction. Apart from that, they drove through a great silence between cornfields and soy fields, the last faint light in the sky picking out distant farms and silos. They passed what looked like a brand-new ethanol plant, all lit up but otherwise deserted.

  “Is it always this quiet?” Alex asked.

  “Nah,” said Danny. “Sometimes it gets really exciting. Fourth of July, Founders’ Day, Thanksgiving. We have parades.”

  Alex sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m tired and that came out all wrong.”

  Danny chuckled. “I guess it is pretty quiet round here, if you’re used to Boston.” Like everyone who’d seen Good Will Hunting more than once, he tried to do the accent by pronouncing it Bawstun. “It’s okay, though. Good country, good people.”

  “I heard the economy was on its knees.”

  “It is. Everywhere else.”

  After about forty minutes, buildings began to appear at the side of the road. Houses first, then public buildings and storefronts with a lot of space between them. Main Street was a double row of stores and bars, a firehouse, police station, a couple of diners. It was gone almost as soon as Alex realised it was Main Street, and they were heading out into the countryside again.

  A couple of minutes after that, they were pulling into an almost-empty parking lot to one side of a big five-storey building with a sign outside that said NEW ROSE HOTEL.

  “You’re kidding me,” Alex said half to himself, as the sign went by.

  “The owner’s a big Gibson fan,” Danny said.

  The foyer of the hotel was huge and empty and smelled brand new. Through a set of glass doors to one side Alex could see the tables of a dining room, and to one side a gift shop, which appeared to be closed. Behind the front desk, a young woman beamed at them as they embarked on the long journey towards her.

  “Hi, Danny,” she said when they finally reached the desk. “Hi, sir. How are you today?”

  “I’m fine, thanks, Grace,” said Danny. “This is Mr Dolan and he’ll be staying with us for a couple of days.”

  “That’s great,” said Grace, smiling at Alex. “Welcome, Mr Dolan.”

  “Thank you,” Alex said.

  “We’ll just check…” she said, consulting what Alex presumed was a computer monitor on a shelf below the desktop. “Yes, that’s right. Three nights on Mr Clayton’s account.” She slid a pen and a registration card towards him. “If you’ll just fill this in, Mr Dolan, I’ll make up your room key.”

  Alex filled in the boxes on the card, ticked it in a couple of places, left blank the little space where it asked if he wanted to receive further information from the hotel, and when he slid it back across the desktop Grace was holding out a mobile phone.

  “Excuse me?” he asked.

  Her smile didn’t waver. “Your key, Mr Dolan,” she said.

  Danny stepped in. “I haven’t explained yet,” he told Grace.

  She looked at him and back to Alex, and he thought he saw her smile dim just a fraction. “Oh,” she said.

  “I’ve had a long day,” Alex told them.

  “The hotel uses electronic keys downloaded to your phone,” said Danny. “Your own phone probably isn’t compatible so we’ll issue you this one for your stay.”

  “Okay.” Alex took the phone. It sounded unnecessarily complicated, but Stan was paying for everything so it seemed ungrateful to complain.

  “All the access to the Facility runs on the same system,” Danny went on. “They’ll program the relevant keys onto the phone when you go over there.”

  “Right.” He turned the phone over in his hand.

  “You can also use it to pay for stuff in the stores here. You’ll find it’s been loaded with a line of credit.”

  “Can it make calls?” Alex asked.

  “Sure it can,” Grace said proudly. “And we have a 7G network everywhere in the county.”

  “Just don’t drop it in the toilet,” Danny warned. “This batch of phones has a manufacturing fault. They’re not wildly waterproof.”

  “Well,” said Alex, looking at the phone again. “Thank the gods there’s something it can’t do.” He saw them exchange glances and he sighed. “Sorry. I was still in Boston at seven o’clock this morning, I had lunch in San Francisco, and now I’m here. I think everything’s starting to catch up on me.”

  “You don’t travel much, do you,” said Danny.

  “Not a lot, no.”

  He didn’t look convinced—what kind of Important Writer wasn’t used to travelling?—but he let it go. “You go get some rest,” he said. He put out a hand. “I hope I get to see you again before you go back to Boston.”

  “Sure.” They shook hands. “Thanks for the ride.”

  He grinned. “That’s what I’m here for.” He nodded to Grace. “Grace. See you at the weekend?”

  Grace bobbed her head,
all smiles. “I’ll be there.”

  “Okay, then.” And with a nod to Alex and a last wave, he was gone.

  “Danny’s my brother-in-law,” Grace explained.

  Alex held up the phone and waggled it.

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes. Room 500. Top floor. Just hold the phone against the door and it’ll unlock for you.”

  “Thank you,” he said. He picked up his bag and began to trudge towards the bank of elevators on the far side of the lobby.

  THE FIFTH FLOOR was a deeply carpeted silence. The elevator opened onto a small vestibule with a corridor to the left and the doors to the emergency stairs to the right. The corridor ended in a single door. No number, just a handle. Alex took the phone out and held it against the wood and heard a click somewhere inside the door. He pushed down on the handle and the door swung open.

  “Oh,” he said.

  Room 500 seemed, at first glance, to occupy the entire top floor of the New Rose Hotel. He stepped out of a short hallway into a huge reception room, as if someone had mapped a high-end dentist’s waiting room onto the inside of an aircraft hangar. The far wall—and it really was very far—was all window. He trekked across the room, his heels sinking into the deep-pile carpet, and leaned his forehead against the glass. The cold against his skin felt good, but when he straightened up he saw he’d left a greasy spot on the window and he had to polish it off with his handkerchief. Spread out in the distance, Sioux Crossing was slumbering in the moonlight, a neat vista of trees and houses. It was mostly level ground, but to the west the land rose and fell in a series of low hills that disappeared towards an uncertain horizon. He couldn’t see the buildings of the Facility; either it was over on the other side of the hotel or it was just too far away. He tried to picture the maps and photos from Stan’s brochure but he was too tired and the images wouldn’t come. It was hard enough to imagine where Iowa was, let alone anything else. He just stood looking at the view, waiting for his brain to catch up. Somewhere out there, buried under the fields and the woods, was the most powerful particle collider on Earth. Or rather, it would be, if they ever managed to get it working; it had been, so far, a project beset by glitches and breakdowns and general snafus. Right now, it was merely a very expensive tunnelling project. And Stan expected him to change the public image of that somehow.

  Eventually, he turned from the window and set out to explore the suite, which took a while. There were three bedrooms, all of them ensuite. There was a fully equipped kitchen, complete with a fridge that was taller than he was, stocked with beer and juice and water and bacon and eggs and a couple of steaks and a bag of granola. He spent some time pondering the world view of people who put granola in the fridge.

  There was an old-style landline phone on a side table in the living room, along with a little laminated card with handy numbers. He dialled room service and ordered a club sandwich and fries. He thought room service sounded mildly reproachful that, given a perfectly good kitchen and all the food he could possibly need, a man couldn’t be bothered to actually cook, but he might have been imagining it.

  He hung up, and all of a sudden the day seemed to just sit down on him. He’d woken up in his own bed in Boston this morning, and now here he was in Iowa, in the world’s largest hotel suite, and everything in-between seemed fractured and jumbled and out of sequence. Had he really been in San Francisco? Intellectually, he knew he had, because he was here now, but all he had in his memory was an hallucinatory impression of buildings in fog.

  He took out his phone and speed-dialled a number.

  “Hi,” said Stan. “Alex. Are you there?”

  “I am,” Alex said, looking around the living room. “Wherever ‘here’ is.”

  Stan chuckled. “Are you being looked after all right?”

  “Everyone seems very nice.”

  “You sound tired. Have you eaten?”

  “I ordered something from room service.”

  “Well, good. You order whatever you want, it’s all on my tab. Have dinner, then get some sleep. I want you to have a look round the town tomorrow. There’s a guy up there, Mickey Olive, he looks after my interests. He’ll be in touch.”

  “Mickey Olive.”

  “Great guy. You’ll like him; he’s a Brit.”

  That, in itself, was no guarantee. “I’m going to need some stuff.”

  “Stuff?”

  “Clothes. Stuff. If I’m going to be here a few days. I’ve only got an overnight bag with me.”

  “Sure. Did you get the phone?”

  “Yes, I got the phone.”

  “Good. There’s a line of credit on it; you can use it to buy your stuff. Again, whatever you need.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Within reason. If you get the urge to buy a farm or something like that, you’re on your own.”

  “There’s no chance of that. I’m a city boy.” There was a discreet knock on the door. “Dinner’s here. Got to go.”

  The club sandwich was the size of a briefcase, and came with enough fries to feed a family of four.

  BREAKFAST WAS SERVED in the Prairie Dining Room, a carpeted space large enough to host a medium-sized awards dinner. Each of the hundred or so tables was laid out with four place settings and a little vase containing a single flower. It was completely deserted.

  Alex stood in the doorway for a couple of minutes, baffled. Then he hiked back to the front desk, where a young woman whose nametag read KATE was signing a wad of forms.

  “Hi, Mr Dolan,” she said as he approached. “Is everything okay?”

  Alex was beginning to feel a faint nostalgia for the time when no one knew who he was. “Have I missed breakfast?” he asked.

  “No,” she said brightly. “Just go in and sit down anywhere. Someone will be out to take your order.”

  Okay. He went back into the dining room. There was a small stack of fresh newspapers by the door, and he took one as he went past, then dithered for a few moments before seating himself at a table right in the middle of the room.

  A minute or so later, a waiter came out with a menu. “Bacon, scrambled eggs, hash browns, sausage,” said Alex, reading down the list. “Toast. In small portions, please.”

  While he waited for his breakfast to arrive, Alex looked at the newspaper. The Rosewater County Banner, according to its masthead. Est. 1932. That was a pretty good age, considering the catastrophe which was overtaking print journalism. The front page headline was about a new building opening on the Clayton Campus, and the announcement of another seventy job vacancies. The rest of the paper was a compendium of small-town news. Someone’s sow had won first prize at the County Fair. In the photo, the animal appeared to be the size of a Volkswagen.

  He glanced up and saw someone walking across the dining room towards him. The newcomer was wearing a long dark-grey overcoat over a black sweatshirt and jeans, and there was a white silk scarf around his neck.

  He reached the table and held out a hand. “Mr Dolan? I’m Michael Olive.” He had a plummy, deep-brown voice and a Home Counties accent. “Everyone calls me Mickey.”

  “Alex.” They shook hands.

  “May I join you?”

  “Stan told me to expect you.” As Mickey sat opposite him, his breakfast arrived. It wasn’t quite the colossal portions he had been fearing, but it was still going to be a while before he needed to eat again. “Why is everything so big here?”

  Mickey raised an eyebrow. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a broken nose and untidy brown hair. “You’re not in the normal world any more, I’m afraid,” he said. “It takes a little while to get used to it.”

  Alex picked up his knife and fork and looked at his plate. “Do you want some of this? I’ll never eat it all.”

  Mickey shook his head. “I already ate. I was going to pop over last night, but I thought it would be best to let you settle in.”

  “Yesterday was pretty weird.”

  “Yes. Well, the dangerous thing is when you stop noticing just how weird i
t is. Is everything all right? Is there anything you need?”

  “I need to do some shopping, if I’m going to be here a few days.”

  “Stan emailed me about it.” Mickey picked up the vase from the middle of the table, sniffed the flower, wrinkled his nose, and put it back. “I’m afraid I’m going to be out of town most of today, otherwise I’d show you around, but I can get someone to give you the grand tour.”

  Alex shook his head. “I can manage.”

  “Good.” Mickey put his hand in his coat pocket and rummaged for a moment, then came up with a bunch of keys threaded on a length of string. “This is for you.”

  There was a cardboard tag on the string too. 24 EAST WALDEN LANE was written on it in block capitals. “What do I need these for?”

  “They’re the keys to your house.”

  “I have a house?”

  “You will, if you decide to accept Stan’s offer. I thought you might like to take a look, while you’re here, but you don’t have to.”

  Alex looked at the keys again, then put them down beside his plate. “Will I get to see the facility while I’m here?”

  Mickey nodded. “That’s all in hand. How does the day after tomorrow sound?”

  Alex glanced at him, then went back to his breakfast. “It sounds okay, but I don’t want to be here too long.”

  Mickey regarded him sadly. “I know this is all new to you, but perhaps it’s best to look at it as a bit of a holiday, with someone else paying for everything. Stan’s very keen to have you on board. Just relax and enjoy yourself.”

  “In Iowa?”

  “Well,” Mickey mused. “Quite.” He twitched up the sleeve of his overcoat and looked at his watch. “I have to go. Are you sure there’s nothing you need?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “Right.” Mickey stood. “I’ll see you soon, then. If you do need anything, my number’s on the phone they gave you.”

  “Okay. Thanks. Nice to meet you.” They shook hands again and Mickey left, and all of a sudden Alex felt very alone in the middle of the huge dining room.