The Living End (28 page)

He leaned in and grabbed my arm. His eyes were manic.

“I caught one. One of the smoke-faced men. Trapped it.”

“What part of ‘no time’ are you not understanding?” I said. “There are bigger problems to deal with—”

“That’s the point! I did more than trap it. I can
weaponize it
.”

That caught my attention.

“Against Lauren?” I said.

“Against the Garden and anything touched by it. Unchecked life meets concentrated occult entropy. Boom. Or more likely, a faint hissing sound as it just…boils away. Come to New York.”

“Why New York?” I said. “What’s there?”

“Our laboratory, the off-site facility Ausar set up for Nedry, Clark, and me during the Viridithol experiments. I needed some of my old equipment. The old girl’s in lousy shape, and I had to bring in a portable generator for power, but it’s good enough for my work.”

“I’m up against the wall here,” I told him. “Flying across the country and back is going to cost time I can’t afford to waste. You are absolutely, completely, one hundred percent certain you can do this?”

He took a deep breath and nodded. The mania in his eyes faded to steely determination.

“I want to make amends,” he said. “This is how. Just come as soon as you can.”

The smoke cleared outside the window, ripping apart to show the skyline of New York City directly below us. Then the plane’s nose wobbled, tilting like the first car of a roller coaster at the top of its peak, and veered straight down. The plane plummeted from the sky.

I clutched the armrests, gravity forcing me back into the seat, my heart pounding as we went into free fall. A crowded city street lined with cars came racing up to greet us with the speed of a cannonball. I didn’t have the breath to scream or time to think. At the last second, I caught a blurry glimpse of a street sign and a string of numbers. An address.

Then I slammed into the ground at four hundred miles an hour.

I shot bolt upright in bed. My skin was clammy, slick with cold sweat. The scarlet letters of the bedside clock read 3:18. I stumbled into the hallway. Caitlin was already awake, sitting at the glass kitchen table and puttering on her laptop. She glanced over, her eyebrows lifting.

“Go back to bed,” she said. “You need more sleep.”

“No time. Bob Payton dreamwalked to find me. He might have something. I’ll explain in a minute, have to get cleaned up.”

No sooner had I cranked up the twin heads in Caitlin’s shower, filling the chamber with billowing steam, than the frosted glass door swung open and she joined me inside.

“If things are that urgent,” she said, holding up a loofah, “you can tell me now. Turn around.”

“He snagged one of the smoke-faced men. Says he can turn it into some kind of weapon.”

Caitlin’s hand slid over my back, followed by the plush, wet touch of the soapy sponge, milking away the tension in my shoulders.

“Can he do it?” she asked.

“He thinks he can. Look, he knows I wouldn’t have any qualms about killing him. He’s putting his neck on the chopping block, reaching out to me like this. If he didn’t think he could deliver, he wouldn’t have done it.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“If all goes well, I’ll be back by sundown,” I said. “I know Pixie needed a little time with the recordings we made of Roth’s voice, to get the next part of the plan ready. I also need somebody to rent the motel room for that part, and basically to make sure everybody’s on call when and where I need them. I know you’re busy planning for Case Exodus, so I hate to ask—”

“Yes, I’ll keep everyone on task while you’re gone,” she said, purring in my ear. “I’m
very
good at cracking the whip.”

That was how I ended up back at the airport before dawn, drinking black coffee from a recycled paper cup and listening to the come-play-me chimes from a bank of slot machines in the concourse. Vegas’s farewell to the tourist traffic, suctioning out the last of their pocket change before kicking them back home. Every minute I spent here was a minute lost forever. I blew on my coffee and tried not to pace.

Five hours and five minutes to JFK International. That was 305 minutes for Lauren to get closer to the prize, while I sat crammed into an economy-class seat somewhere over the endless American heartland. All I could get was a window seat, and every bump of turbulence brought back the memory of my dreaming death-dive. They showed a movie on the flight, some romantic comedy I remembered seeing commercials for a few months back and promptly forgetting, and I dozed my way through it. Snatches of canned dialogue and laugh lines washed over the cheap plastic headphones and slipped through my groggy thoughts, none of it making much sense.

We touched down on the tarmac with a heavy thump and a mechanical howl as the jet braked hard and fast. JFK was like a microcosm of New York itself: hard and brusque and impatient, under skies that looked like chunks of broken slate. I skipped the crowds at the baggage claim and headed outside, bracing myself against a sudden gust of cold wind. The weather was somewhere in the mid fifties, with rain on the horizon, and I hadn’t even thought to bring a jacket. The air outside tasted like burnt diesel.

I didn’t have to wait long for a cab. I gave the cabbie the address I’d seen in Bob’s dream, and he looked back at me through a sheet of knife-scarred Plexiglas.

“Yonkers, huh?” he said in a thick Jersey accent. “Y’know that’s a seventy, eighty-buck ride, right? Lot cheaper to take the airtrain up to Jamaica Station, then hop the blue line.”

“I’m in a hurry,” I said.

“Suit yourself,” he told me and gave the meter box a fat-fingered slap to start it running.

The address turned out to be in Northwest Yonkers, in a long and lonely stretch of decommissioned factories with their dirty noses pressed to the Hudson River. The taxi rumbled over broken train tracks and splashed through mud puddles on the torn-up remnants of old parking lots.

“You, ah, sure you got the right address?” the cabbie asked.

I was sure. It wasn’t what I saw—it was what I felt: an electric tingle in the air that had nothing to do with the black thunderclouds on the horizon. There was magic here, old and rich and powerful, setting my teeth on edge. The numbers that flashed before my dream-eyes hung on a red brick wall, under a concrete plaque reading “MacKenzie and Sons Shipping, Est. 1891.”

“This is the place,” I said. “Right here’s fine.”

He stopped the cab, and I counted off bills from my wallet.

“You know,” he told me, “you can get out here, but coming back’s another story. You ain’t gonna find a cab within a mile of this place, especially after sundown.”

I slipped the fare through a slot in the plastic window, plus an extra twenty.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got an exit strategy,” I told him. I got out, and the cold wind ruffled my hair as the taxi drove away.

A big orange CONDEMNED sticker covered the wire-grid window on the warehouse door. A padlock lay on the broken concrete at my feet, snipped open with a pair of bolt cutters. Bob had let himself in.

I let myself in, too.

K
lieg lights dangled from the warehouse scaffolding, their power lines running to a portable generator that chugged and coughed like a heavy smoker running a marathon. Harsh white beams rained down on the warehouse floor, casting stark illumination against rusted vats and shelves lined with broken equipment and cobwebs.

Bob Payton had traded his tattered bathrobe for a lab coat and shaved his frosty beard. His cheeks were a mess of uneven stubble and old scars. He looked to the door and waved me over, toward a table where he’d set up a teapot on a hotplate.

“You’re here. Good. Right on time. Here, drink this.”

He sloshed three fingers of pale herbal tea into a dirty coffee mug and held it out to me. It smelled like sweaty socks and mint.

“What is it?” I said, wrinkling my nose.

“Green tea mixed with ground datura seeds.”

I shook my head. “I can’t get messed up right now. No time.”

“A very, very light dosage,” he said. “Please. You’ll need it to see what I’ve done.”

He had a point. I held my nose and gulped it down in two swallows. It had an aftertaste like cold medicine, bitter and filmy on my teeth. Bob flitted away like a bird, jittery and fast, huddling over a workbench.

“Aren’t you going to drink any?” I said.

“What? No. For one thing, taking datura orally is incredibly dangerous. You should never do it. It can wreck your stomach lining.”

“But—I just—”

He looked back and pointed at his dilated eyes. The back of his hand was coated in ink, scrawled with occult glyphs that ran under the sleeve of his coat.

“Second, there’s not enough in there to touch me,” he said. “Like I said, very light dose. I have to ingest very large quantities of hallucinogens to get where I’m going. And I have been. For two days straight. Haven’t slept a wink.”

“For somebody who’s tripping balls right now,” I said, “you are remarkably lucid.”

“I went to college in Berkeley in the sixties. Trust me, I can swallow down a fistful of Quaaludes and lead a discussion on the themes of Sartre. Angle that standing light my way, would you please?”

I tilted the lamp toward his bench. Bob had a vanity mirror propped up against the wall and a fountain pen in his hand. He leaned his head back, dipped the brassy nub of the pen in a vial of black ink, and carefully traced more glyphs along the skin of his throat. I couldn’t place the symbols. They looked a little like Sanskrit, but that was out of my wheelhouse.

“Seals of protection,” he explained. “Like I said, warding and containment is my specialty. I know how to keep my skin intact when dealing with creatures not of our world.”

“I thought the smoke-faced men were buddies of yours. They called you their father.”

In the mirror, he gave a pained smile. “That was before.”

I gazed across the room. In the center of a block of bare concrete, white chalk marked the curves of a binding seal, a pentacle inside two concentric circles lined with writings in ancient Hebrew. Five white candles, halfway burned down, stood at the points of the star. There wasn’t anything inside the circle, at least nothing I could see.

The side effects of the tea crept up behind me, in the shape of a slowly growing headache and a sudden wave of nausea that made my guts clench.

“You’re feeling it,” Bob said, looking back at me through the mirror as he dipped his pen in the inkwell. “Sorry. This isn’t exactly a recreational drug. Shamanic experiences are rarely joyrides.”

“What I’m feeling,” I said, “is hungover and pissed off. This isn’t even worki—”

I watched as the tip of Bob’s pen touched his throat and left a squiggling black worm in its wake. The glyphs on his skin were alive, subtle but squirming, wanting to break free of the flesh and fly. I watched him in rapt silence, my eyes tracing the faint trails of light that ebbed from the motions of his fingertips.

“Still with me?” he said.

Strange question
, my brain said.
How could anyone be with anyone? We’re born alone. We die alone. It’s better that way. You disappoint fewer people.

Still, the air between us rippled, and I thought I could pick out the currents of our breaths flowing between our bodies. How many other people’s breaths did I have in my lungs? How many of their molecules were in my body? Weren’t we all together, basically?

I lolled my head to the left. My blood ran cold, and my college-freshman philosophy ran dry. The binding circle wasn’t empty anymore. The creature trapped inside had given up all pretense of playing at a human form. It was a tornado of black smoke, churning and furious, lashing out like a bullwhip at the invisible barriers that caged it. I could feel its emotions, vibrating like discordant music on a half-tuned radio station. Hunger and hate. The urge to consume and consume, until nothing remained but ashes.

“You can see him now,” Bob said. “Good. Let me show you something.”

He held up a test tube, corked on the end, filled with a luminous green goo.

“Concentrated Viridithol,” he said.

He walked over to the binding circle. I was sitting down on the floor. I couldn’t remember sitting down, but it made sense. My legs were woozy, and my head wouldn’t stop pounding.

“Have to be careful with my aim,” Bob said, gesturing at the candles. “This stuff is flammable as hell. Wouldn’t do to break the wards right now. That’d be bad for both of us.”

He threw the flask down. It hit the heart of the circle and cracked, splattering tiny glass shards and rivulets of goo across the concrete. The tornado of smoke hit it like a freight train, blasting down and gusting out over the spill. When the smoke lifted, nothing was left but broken glass. There was no trace that the toxic drug had ever been there, not even a single spilled droplet.

Something was different about the smoke, too. It was a tiny bit lighter, a tiny bit slower.
It’s sick
, I thought.

“I could kill it right now,” Bob said, walking back to his ink and mirror. “Just drag over the drum and splash in the toxins, a cupful at a time. I was tempted. So tempted. Problem is, to my shame, I could only catch one of the creatures. The other one’s running. He knows that ‘father’ has turned on his loving sons.”

He turned and gave me a sad-eyed smile.

“To my shame,” he said. “I’ve been saying that a lot lately.”

The outline of Bob’s body vibrated like a delicate crystal bell. He moved his hands when he spoke, and they left streamers of light in their wake.

I decided I wanted to get up. My legs wouldn’t listen. They went all noodly on me. Treacherous legs.

“I’m afraid I told you a little white lie, Mr. Faust. There was perhaps a bit more in that tea than I let on. Enough to keep you incapacitated for the next four or five hours. Long enough to finish my work.”

He walked to the back of the derelict lab. Rusty wheels squealed as he came back with a rolling cart. I watched helplessly as he checked the tools he’d prepared ahead of time.

A hacksaw. A blowtorch.

“You’re right, you know,” he said. “It’s my fault. So much of it. The Viridithol trials? I knew what we were doing was wrong. All these years, I told myself it was an accident. That we didn’t know anyone would get hurt. That’s no absolution. Those mutated children, those dead mothers…we did that.
I
did that.”