Excerpt: Multitudes

The first time I saw her was in the line outside Aztech, on the day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday. She stood out in the crowd, of course. Her olive skin, flaming red hair, and pale blue eyes would have made her stand out anywhere, almost as though she were a photographic negative, or as though she were drawn with a slightly different palette than the rest of the world.
I was there, like the rest of the five AM crowd, on a minor Christmas shopping expedition, waiting to buy a new phone for my cousin Lisa, and, if I manage to be one of the first 200 customers inside the store, a new plasma TV for myself. Hence the five AM part. I'm not usually what you'd call a morning person.
They were letting people inside the boxy warehouse unconvincingly disguised as an early Mesoamerican temple in cohorts of about twenty at a time, leaving the rest of us to mill about in a rough line. Behind me, the line curved out of sight around the outside of the store, and ahead of me and beyond the front doors it re-emerged to extend into the parking lot. I figured that my own cohort would be allowed access shortly, with only one or two groups ahead. To kill a bit of time and to distract myself from the increasingly inane conversation going on just in front of me, which had turned to the scintillating topic of whether the Wizard of Oz had actually been only a dream or if Dorothy could have stayed forever in the Emerald City, I engaged in a bit of people-watching along the other direction of the line. I was mainly looking to see if I saw anyone I recognized, although that didn't seem too likely. And that's when I saw her, making it look like someone had hacked into my visual cortex and manipulated the images to insert this improbable, but certainly striking, young woman.
She was several places in the line behind me; too far to start a conversation even if I had been the sort of person who can get away with striking up discussions with random strangers he meets in line at a consumer electronics store. In fact, I don't even consider myself the sort of person who can get away with looking directly at strangers I meet in line at a consumer electronics store, so beyond that initial impression I barely had time to notice her clothing-blueish-gray, functional rather than decorative-before moving on to the rest of the crowd. And it wasn't long after that the line began to move again, allowing the people ahead of me entrance to the store.
The group allowed in seemed slightly larger than the previous ones, extending all the way to the people just ahead of me, but no further. While it was annoying to have been so close without making it in, I wasn't unhappy to hear the last argument that the return to black-and-white film meant that the Kansas farm was less real rather than moreso than the magical world which was, like normal reality, fully colored. The security guard managing the entrance said something unintelligible into his walkie-talkie, and received a burst of vaguely vocal noise in response, and I along with the rest of the line settled into our new positions.
Then, like everyone else, I waited. For a fairly long time, at least it seemed to me. I looked around at the group behind a few times. She was still there, still as incongruently as before, and at least once she seemed to be looking directly at me. The group of people between us was getting agitated, complaining to one another about how long they had been standing, and I thought to check my watch. It was almost six; I'd been there, at the front of the line almost twice as long as it had taken for between the last two groups. I saw that the unrest in the crowd was spreading like a spark down a trail of gunpowder, and it was also at this time that I noticed that she was no longer there.
The security guard- Rick, according to his nametag- barked an almost intelligible question over his walkie-talkie. There was no response. He repeated the utterance again. Again, there was no reply. He spoke again over the machine, saying what was probably "This isn't funny." Still no reply.
Rick squeezed the walkie-talkie one more time, saying "Alright, I'm letting the next twenty in unless you tell me not to." "Lessu temmy nottu", but I'd cracked the key of his accent by then. He waved us forward, and I walked forward, opened the door, and stepped inside the store.
Something was clearly wrong, but it took me and the people behind me a more than a few minutes to realize just what it was. The store was as loud as ever, with Elvis drawling out a Christmasy song coming from the main speakers, but that, and a few other televisions and children's toys emitting their own sounds, was the only sound. There was no crowd. There were no clerks. There was nobody whatsoever in the front part of the store other than the twenty or so of us who had just entered.
At this point I wanted nothing more than to get out of there, unnoticed if at all possible. This was going to be on the television news, local if not national, and famous was something that I absolutely did not want to be. But trying to leave now, after having gone inside, would attract even more attention than staying, possibly police attention as well as the media. So that was out.
Instead, I waited for something resembling leadership to emerge from our group. It took a few minutes longer than I'd have liked, but eventually it did. Someone, from toward the back of the store, shouted "There's no one back here."
Another customer, a woman from the voice, called out "Nobody in the stockrooms either."
"What the hell is going on?" said someone near me, an older teenage boy who was dressed for weather about fifteen degrees warmer than today, but didn't seem to notice the chill.
"I'm going to call the police," said an older man, probably in his early fifties, pulling out a cell phone. He frowned at it. "No signal. Anyone else-"
Eight people, including me, pulled out cell phones on what was probably at least four different networks. We didn't have a single bar between us. This wasn't that unusual; reception was never very good in that store.
"Okay, Ellen and I will look for a land line." They walked toward the employees-only area behind the cashiers.
I headed toward the rest rooms. At one time, there had been pay phones there, even when there were hardly any pay phones anywhere. When I got there, I found out that there weren't any there any more. They'd been replaced by a large advertisement for the mobile phone I was planning to get for Lisa when this morning began. I found that I genuinely had to use the rest room, and went inside.
As I was finishing up, I heard a static-filled voice from the next stall. "What's going on in there?" The voice, I quickly decided, was Rick's. The stall was unlocked, and empty apart from a walkie-talkie perched on top of the toilet paper dispenser. "Should I let the next batch in?" said the machine.
I picked it up, squeezed the switch, and said "I don't think that would be a good idea."
"Who's this?" said Rick over the machine. "I know you're not Charlie."
"I'm one of the people you just let in," I said. "There's a bit of a situation inside here, and I don't think it would be a good idea for anyone else to come in just now."
"What do you mean, a situation?"
This was more than a little tricky. It had, by this point, occurred to me that with several hundred Christmas shoppers on one side, and a completely unmanned store full of expensive electronic consumer products on the other, with a single, unarmed rent-a-cop standing between the two was not an equation that favored the continued rule of law and order. A couple dozen people could constrain themselves from turning looter, even if only because any ill-gotten booty would have to be carried out in full view of the crowd waiting outside, but the larger a group gets the less civilized it becomes, in my experience. Further, I was fully aware that the first half dozen or so people in the line would have no problem at all hearing everything that passed between me and Rick over the walkie-talkies. So I chose my words carefully.
"There's been a crime here. A murder," I said, improvising. "The police won't want anyone else to go near their crime scene until their people look at it."
With almost half of the shows on television these days centered around forensics, it seemed a safe bet that he'd understand this story. "Okay, okay," said Rick. "Did they say how long it would be until they get here?"
"No, but it shouldn't be too long," I lied.
"Where's Charlie? He's not the one who..." said Rick suddenly.
"No, I...no. I don't know where he is. Just keep everyone out of here for now, okay?"
I left the rest room and headed back to the front of the store, where the older man had found the store's main telephone. He wasn't talking into it, though, but instead just held it limply, like a dead thing. "No dial tone," he told me dully.
So, the police weren't coming, not yet, and I had closed off the possibility of having Rick the security guard call them for us. I figured I'd better explain that to our patriarch before he sent someone out the front door. He agreed with my assessment and had Ellen try and lock the front door for the time being, then said to me, "So, how do you suggest we get in touch with the police, then?"
"One of the computers back here ought to have a live internet connection."
"Thought of that," he said, pointing at the device. "Locked up with a password."
I walked to the machine and sat down in front of it. "Aztech is a pretty typical paranoid corporation," I said, shuffling through the papers on the desk. "Paranoid enough to require every to use a totally random string of numbers and letters for a password."
"So it's not just the manager's birthday or something."
"Right. Problem with that kind of password, though, is that most people can't memorize it easily. Which means they end up writing it down." I produced a small scrap of paper from the bottom of a pile of printouts. "Which defeats the entire point of having a password at all." I typed in the code at the prompt, and was greeted with a deep blue screen. The system's browser launched, pulling up the Aztech corporate home page. I brought up a search engine to make sure I had a live connection rather than just a cache. It loaded in seconds.
Next, I brought up the local police station's site. There was a 'report a crime' form, but it was for minor complaints, not for emergencies. Emergencies were handled by phone only, to 911 or to a local emergency number. Not an insurmountable problem, though. There are sites out there that can turn a short piece of text into a sound file of those words being spoken by a voice synthesizer. And I have an account with voice-over-internet-protocol phone service that includes, among its features, the ability to turn such a sound file into an automatic call to a number of your choice. Telemarketers and politicians have been using robocallers like this for years, mostly to annoy people when they're trying to eat. I'd used it as a wake-up call more than once.
I called over the older man, whose name I'd picked up was Lonnie, to help compose the message we'd send. After a bit of back and forth editing, we ended up with "Send police to Aztech Electronics, downtown Santa Lora. More than three hundred missing persons, including all store staff. Large number of people outside; crowd control needed soon." I copied and pasted it to repeat five times, then turned it into audio, and had it read to someone at the police station in a computer-generated voice. After that, there wasn't much more to do other than to wait.
"So," said Ellen, to nobody in particular. "Just what do you think happened to everyone."
"My money's on aliens," said one of the younger ones. I couldn't tell from his voice if he was merely acting like an idiot or was actually fool enough to believe what he was saying. He could apparently see the contempt in my face, since he turned straight to me and followed up with "Okay, so what do you think it is, then?"
"People, obviously. Someone taking a bunch of hostages."
"And doing what with them?" asked the boy.
"Well, I guess they'd be moving them to someplace secure before making their demands."
"And how would they do that?"
"Out a rear entrance, I guess," I started. The youngster started to interrupt me, but I cut him off before he started. "No, there were people lined up all the way around the outside of the building. So maybe the roof? A Helicopter?"
"That many people would mean almost a hundred helicopters. I think someone would have noticed that."
Our conversation was interrupted by a pounding on the front door. I thought it was too soon for the police to be hear, and as I looked through the glass panes of the door, I saw that I was right. The crowd had turned ugly out there, enough to barrel past Rick to charge the door. Right now they were knocking and pounding; before long at all I was sure they'd be trying to shove the door down or break the glass. That took less time than I thought it would, but the door held even with a large, angry, bearded man attempting to shove it down. After four failed tries finally convinced him that he was doing nothing to the door but inflicting serious pain upon his own shoulder, he stepped away. The next member of the crowd apparently thought he knew some kind of martial arts. He tried to kick the door down, succeeding only in hurting his own foot. Then I finally heard sirens, and with the prospect of immediate reenforcement to bolster his spirits, Rick managed to reassert control over the door area as the first group of four policemen approached the door. Ellen walked up and unlocked it.
"Okay," said the senior policeman, a full inch taller and far more fully mustached than the others, "So what exactly is going on here?"
I sat back and listened as Lonnie told the story of what we'd seen when we came in here. The other police did a quick search of the store, checking the same rooms we'd checked earlier. The head cop grabbed his radio and called for more backup. I didn't hear every word, but I did catch the initials 'FBI' and 'DHS'. I realized that there probably had been a better way to get in touch with the police. There were lots of cb radio sets that included the police band for sale here, and batteries as well, but I guess I hadn't crossed the line to thinking about the merchandise in the store as a resource.
It wouldn't have worked, though. The same interference that wiped out our cell phone signals appeared to stop anyone from answering on the police radio. They were able to reach their men outside handling the crowd, though, and relay the message on to the station. While they waited for those illustrious agencies to send further backup, the policeman in charge introduced himself as Parker Trout and began interviewing each of us, taking notes in a small black notebook.
"So, Mister Dancer," he asked me for what certainly seemed like the seventeenth time, "Describe exactly how you found the walkie-talkie."
This was a part of the story he was particularly interested in covering in detail with me. In particular, they wanted to know why the guard inside the store, presumably Charlie, left the device in the rest room. If he left the room in a rush, then why did he apparently have time to finish his business and flush the toilet? This little mystery annoyed the policeman to no end, and he was apparently almost desperate for me to confess that I had flushed the 'evidence' down the drain as I picked up the walkie-talkie. Since I had done no such thing, I could not satisfy him. "Maybe," I suggested, "He was constipated?" Parker had no answer for that theory, although it didn't seem to make him happier.
The other part of the situation that perplexed Parker Trout was the fact that we managed to contact them at all without going outside of the building. "Who ever did this is jamming the phones and radios, cuts off the land line, but doesn't bother to disconnect the internet cable? How does that figure?" By this point he was talking more to himself than to me, waiting for someone else to come and take this unsolvable mystery away from him
Eventually someone did. It was around nine AM when the feds arrived. They interviewed everyone again. They started with a new question: what was my car's license tag? I didn't know the whole thing from memory, although I did remember that the letter portion was 'CLR'. Given that and the fact that it was a blue Honda Civic was enough to identify it. I suppose that they were trying to identify the missing shoppers based on what cars were left over after excluding us and the sales crew. After that, the questions became familiar and repetitive again, so I wound up telling the entire tale yet another time, and then, just around noon sent us all on our way home.
I never mentioned her-the woman in the crowd-to any of the police or other agents that morning. This wasn't out of any misplaced desire to protect her, but just because I didn't think that it was in any way relevant. It hadn't yet occurred to me that the fact that she apparently left at pretty much the same time that whatever had happened inside was happening was important. In fact, I had almost completely forgotten about her, and I didn't make the connection at all until the second time I saw her. But that was later. I let the various police and federal agents wave me out of the parking lot, and drove myself home.