AfterNet 01 - Good Cop Dead Cop

hyperbole, but you know what I mean.”
    “Yeah, and I was thinking the same thing. But those kids might just have been window dressing.”
    They were standing outside two double doors. From this distance, the music was quite loud. She could understand the young woman’s indifference to subterfuge.
    She opened the door and the heat, light and sound hit her in the face. At first all she could see were the outlines of bodies against the strobing lights. The room, probably a gymnasium for the old school, was packed with kids dancing.
    “Shut the door!” someone yelled. An arm reached out to pull the door closed and Yamaguchi jumped quickly to enter.
    “I CAN’T GO IN THERE LINDA!” Munroe shouted as she slid through the closing gap of the door and was left alone.
    Yamaguchi was immediately pushed against the walls of the gym by the rhythmic convulsions of the crowd. Inside the gym, the sound was so loud she could feel her chest thumping to the beat of the music.
    “I’m going to see if I can find someplace where I can see better,” she said to Munroe, unaware she’d left him outside. She jammed her ear buds tight to her ears with her hand to hear his reply, but the noise was deafening.
    She squeezed her way through the crowd and found a little space a quarter of the way around the perimeter of the gym. An eddy had appeared beside a collection of boxes that were probably used to transport the audio and computer equipment for the rave. She pulled herself up onto the biggest box and stood.
    She took the video camera out of her coat pocket and brought it up to her face. Through its viewfinder she could see out over the crowd and saw that the gym had been partitioned. A long, narrow room had been created in one quarter of the space, it walls nothing more than two-by-fours framed like inside out ribs to support plywood panels.
    The sides of the walls facing outward weren’t covered by plywood. It looked like a movie or a stage set. The walls were sitting on platforms, braced by angled two-by-fours. The platforms sat slightly above the gym floor and she guessed the platforms were on casters.
    She could only see a single opening, a glass door that allowed access to the temporary room. A chain-link fence, maybe using some of the fencing from outside the school building, created a corridor leading to the door. She realized that with a crowd this packed, the dead wouldn’t want to — “Shit!” she said.
    She rolled her right arm toward her face to see the tiny LCD screen of her portable terminal. “No user connected” the display said. Of course, Munroe wouldn’t want to enter such a crowded space. He was still outside.
    Munroe immediately tried to regain the field of Yamaguchi’s terminal, but it was gone. He realized he could wait until the door opened again to admit another partygoer, but he knew he still wouldn’t want to enter the crowded gym. He’d be buffeted left and right and make no progress through the throng. Being insubstantial had its drawbacks.
    He looked to his right. The gym was at the south end of the building, which was aligned north-south, and the doors Yamaguchi had entered faced west. He walked around the corner and saw the uninterrupted south wall. No way in here. But then he noticed someone standing, facing the building. The figure hiked his shoulders and Munroe realized the person was a man who had just pulled up his zipper after peeing against the wall. The man, really just another young kid, started walking away from Munroe, who followed as quickly as he could.
    The man rounded the southeast corner of the building. Turning the corner himself, Munroe saw him moving into position beside two open double doors, the mirrors of the doors on the west side of the gym. The man stood beside a sign taped to one of the doors: “Disembodied entrance only.” He was probably just there to prevent the living from using the entrance.
    He immediately thought of the cartoon that showed a dog trying to lure a cat into a clothes dryer with a sign above it saying “Cat Fud.”
    He also noticed a small box above the double doors that looked like the boxes at Rybold’s house that detected the presence of a dead person. A small LED on the box had turned green as he had approached. He backed away and the LED darkened. He looked at the young man guarding the door, who appeared unaware of his presence. Perhaps it was a counter and not an alarm.
    He moved closer to the open doors and could see that the