Jessop shook his head, chuckling low in his throat.
“You both have questions.”
“More than I could ever ask in one lifetime.” Kingsley felt weak in the knees. Jessop flicked his hair out of his eyes.
“Good. Questions mean you’re engaging with reality. Now to pick your brains and see if you’re asking the right questions, huh?” He climbed up atop a metal chest and spread his arms.
“For starters, you’re wondering what is so heinous about Madame Kelley’s watermark crime, right? We all look relatively healthy. Plus, we’re all presumably alive. Not so much sand in the crawl on this one, right? Maybe we could write her a ticket or fine her for the cruddy housing conditions of her own children, yeah? Well, first, notice some things. One, we’re all staggered in ages, so that tells you that these murders were meditated and carried out over a lengthy expanse of time. Second one should be obvious: The whole werewolves, sharks, owls, gators, and so on thing ain’t natural even when you’re talking zombies. Goes to show her trick of suspending animation wasn’t always so successful as you remember, Louie.”
“I guess not?” Kingsley looked to Kiara, who was staring at her feet.
“Good, guesses mean that you actually have some capacity for theory of mind. We might get somewhere sometime today, Louie.” Jessop clapped his hands heavily together. A series of clap lights began to flick on. Kingsley took a stumbling jump backward and knocked chemical vials off the table, shattering them into a million little pieces.
“What are they? Hide them!” Kingsley covered his eyes with shaking hands. There were little human bodies suspended in crystal vials. They floated like fetuses in utero in various chemical solutions that were morphing them into things of less than human, more than animal hybrid nature. Kingsley realized in a single moment that all of mythology had a scientific basis. A dark and twisted art.
“You’ve heard most of the story of Leona Kelley’s infamous girlhood years from my Auntie, Doctor. Allow me to recap some of it in brief. Lil’ Caroline Riveaulx was proselytized by the chemistry prodigy that also happened to have been graced with artistry, the one and only Keith Fulton. The kid was like Karl Marx junior and had written up a whole theory of government he liked to call “Dantism,” based after Dante’s Divine Comedy—and paying special attention to the Inferno parts.” Jessop paused to bar his myriad teeth. Kiara had sunk to her knees. It was almost impossible for her to hear the story he was about to tell, least of all to hear it so bluntly.
“So, the kids in class with Dante started going along with his crazy philosophy. None more so than little, impressionable Caroline. She practically worshiped him. Threw herself at him several times. He put her off, saying that he was asexual. That was a cover-up act for his nightly stints as a Satanist rapist through the streets of New Orleans.” Jessop swallowed and leaned over the counter, staring at the linoleum.
“Caroline, she was determined to win Dante’s heart. She was the volunteer for his ritual assignment for their class. They would start performing murders in the midst of the plays the theater-based high school they attended did on a regular basis. Kids started disappearing from the school and wound up in dumpsters all over creation. To divert attention from her boyfriend, Caroline campaigned to bring the murderers to justice, sending out her brother’s local biker gang to hunt the scuzzes down and turn them over to the police.” Jessop looked at Kiara, who was scrambling for something to breathe into to stop her hyperventilation.
“Dante wasn’t satisfied with the sneaky, stage effect murders anymore. He wanted to explore the super heavy stuff, like the science behind the satanic practice rituals. Caroline agreed with his theory that there had to be a lingering cell memory in the residual DNA of decaying people and that certain cognitive exercises would awaken that cell memory. That one could learn things about the past from reawakening that concentrated consciousness of the deceased and that maybe one could also process advanced scientific data from the dimension that they had passed into.” Jessop held up some test vials that had blood dissolving with some smoking chemical in it.
“I think your superstitious sensei Ms. Kiara Riveaulx would be the first person to tell you this, if she weren’t otherwise indisposed. The paranormal is an absolutely real science beyond the average human comprehension. It isn’t a game and it isn’t to be tampered with. That was the mistake that Caroline Riveaulx made. She went to the deepest, blackest, most off-the-record place that the Dark Arts can summon to learn the science that goes beyond the physically observed. If you want to beat the Devil, Doctor Kingsley—if you want to set Auntie Kiara free from the oppressive chain her mistress had clamped on her—I will have to take you to the most unholy place in Leona Kelley’s history. The Dark Altar of Centralia. In a cave about 30 miles from here.” He looked up at his little brothers and sisters floating in solution and shook his head.
“I want to end this as much as you do. My mother has caused me and mine more pain than you can possibly image. The Dark Altar, the superlab where science and superstition bleed into one, that is where we were all sacrificed to the gods she’d made. It’s where Caroline’s girls took Kiara when they wanted to make her something else. It’s where Kiara lost her soul, became Bleach, wandered in limbo and found her purpose again.” He paused, watching with glittering eyes as Kingsley scooped Kiara to her feet and laid her face against his shoulder.
“Take me here and take me down as deep as I’ve got to go. I’m not stupid. I’ve tasted the heat wafting from her before. I know exactly how deep this is gonna break me. If I break, if I burn, then that’s just how it has to be. I swear as God is hearing that I will stop her.” He looked down into Kiara’s face.
For the first time in his life, he had something valuable to lose.
*****
Chapter 22
“Jane, if you’ve got your game back I’m gonna need some help here, kiddo.” Joseph fought the wheel. The biker mob was making them slide in figure eights back into the New Orleans’ city streets. Survivors from Harrison’s army were scrambling.
Jane’s eyes glittered. They watched her in anticipation. She had been dead. Then she had been in myriad scientifically impossible pieces. Now she was alive and in control of herself but still acting a little off.
“I-uh…Wait…I’m trying to siphon through all of it.” Her head swiveled to side, eyes focused with twenty times the average human consciousness. She reached through the window and grabbed the barrel of a biker’s rifle before she could pull the trigger, yanking her off her bike and pulling her through the window. She cleaned the biker’s belt off of various handguns and other weapons and started passing them out before letting the writhing biker slip off into the street.
“Right. That went well.” Dexter’s eyes widened. Jane pressed a Colt .45 into his hands.
“This is how you load it. Then you aim with the sight on top, then squeeze the trigger. Don’t let your hand shake and don’t squeeze ‘til you know it’s the only option.” Jane guided Dexter’s hands quickly, looking back at the soldiers and President Matthews. The President sat stunned between the boys after hearing them spill all the knowledge that they had compiled and remembered from their days as secret citizen soldier police.
“Guess they’ve run it all by you, sir?” Jane shoved a spare clip into her stolen M4 Carbine and studied the President carefully. He could hardly look at her as he realized everything he’d put her through.
“I’m sure they’ve not told me everything. I do understand that the major owners of American stock, the Fulton family, have committed total treason and the Shreveport Supersonic Vehicle project is compromised.”
“Did they tell you what her end game is?” Jane turned, leaned out the window and balanced the rifle’s barrel across the rearview mirror to stabilize its kicking.
“We would if we knew that.” Leaf kept beating out the flames he was lighting in the upholstery with his palms and tried to load the pistol he’d been handed without melting through it.
/> “I’ve been inside her head, you guys. Even now this body is still linked to the Andromeda in ways. That’s why I need to purify my blood, if I don’t Andromeda’s brain stimulus poisons me and sucks me back into her consciousness. “Jane clutched at her head as more static radio waves broke her concentration.
“So, you escaped from her and then you came to us to warn us what the end game was.” Derek reached forward and laid a hand on her shoulder. His quaking was enough to jar her back to reality. She nodded and looked back at him with frantic eyes.
“This business with the Fulton family will end with taking the Vatican City over and turning it into some kind of satanic/scientific research capital.” Jane’s head pivoted in the convulsive electro-frequency that had been overtaking it before her doubles exploded. They all held their breaths afraid they were about to lose this vessel. The Geryon twisted his head and gasped as a message of collective consciousness seized his android mind and giving him speech again.
“Mistress says to tell you that plan is only the beginning. Now she- Ah! Now she can be everywhere at once, like the girl. Like the girl because she drank Andromeda’s blood.”
“What’s it saying? What does he mean by that, Jane?” Matthew’s was going white.
“Oh God…” Derek bowed his head. Leaf looked at him, understanding.
“What?” Dexter took Jane’s hand. She was fighting with herself to form the words, electricity rolling down her neck and temporarily paralyzing her.
“It means that when Leona bit the Andromeda she started doing the same freaky hologram tango that Andromeda does. Leona can make doubles of herself now too. Oh, joy…” Joseph slapped the wheel, tossing his head.
They barely had time to process the sheer horror of this when a new Bugatti came shrieking down the street. The scissor doors popped open and the passengers leaned forward with their matching Tommy guns.
“Dad!” Leaf’s whole body burst flames from the shock.
*****
Chapter 23
“I can see…I see…Now I can hear them!” Leona’s hands shot out in compass rose flashes, moving about her body. For every time her body pulsated, she saw a road flare bright flash. Hundreds of duplicates of her began to fall burning to the ground like meteors knocked out of heaven.
“Now you and I are one and the same. Equal but opposite forces.” Andromeda grimaced as the magnetic impulses forced the lead necrosis in her skin to scratch and bleed. Leona was stunned. She’d been planning something like this from the beginning. To trap her in her own arrogance and turn her into what she had become.
“You could have stopped me…You elected to allow this…Oh my God! You tricked me.”
“Don’t call on God, Leona. You’ve made your bed. Now it’s time for you to lie in it.” Andromeda gnashed her teeth. Leona’s spine tingled and grew cold. She could feel them. All of them. The spirits were running through her with the force of a thousand jets. Their voices demanded justice in a constant chant:
Sic Semper Tyrannus, Sic Semper Tyrannus, Sic Semper-
“Ackkk! Shut up! Shut up!” Leona took her ears in her fists and tore them clean from her head. A magnetic force fused them back to their natural position and an acceleration in her blood began to heal them as soon as she’d destroyed them.
“Come now. You can’t shut this out if you were to gouge out your eyes, ear drums, and pluck your nerves free from within. I am ever more present than any of the sensational world. See, Leona, I am you. Your lingering hate and greed and pride, twisted by the guilt you felt in killing the girl. The only one who ever understood you…” Andromeda was laughing darkly, beating her blackened fists into her chest.
She spread her hands like a swan’s wings over the waters. Most of the pilots of the fighter jets and the crew of Air Force 1 had swum to shore. Some of them she hurtled from their debris rafts the rest of the way as she used her magnetic levitation to propel the blazing wreckage. She began to spiral them about her body with the same grating shriek of saw blades. No sooner were Leona’s doubles born than did Andromeda decapitate them.
“I am your curse. Your agency. Your consciousness. There is no life left in this husk. There was no power in the drug not really, you fool. The power, the secret, lay with you and those highways down to death you opened on your pagan altar!” Andromeda raised the severed heads of Leona’s doubles and pummeled her with them.
“You?! How could you know?!” Leona thrashed in the thin air like floundering in the water, shrieking and swatting at her own copied skulls that stoned her.
“For all the knowledge you unleashed upon the world…For all those ways you discovered were the wrong way to complete a resurrection…We might assume you were clever. Swift on the uptake! What you fail to recognize, dear girl is that I am you! I am them! I am all of them combined! When you resurrected the girl’s body, you resurrected a host a house for all those that you murdered…That’s what happens when you combine the magic Andromeda poison with a cognitive calibrator drug!” The Andromeda began to bend the pieces of shrapnel into the shape of an elaborate ball and chain.
“You and I will live forever, Leona! Don’t you see! Our torment never ends! Are we not still on earth to punish the wicked and even our very selves! Yes, we are! Which gives us the incentive! We must destroy the altar! We must pay blood for blood the blood that we have taken!” Andromeda snapped her fingers and the magnetized debris was electrified by her sparks. Leona’s cage burst into flame. She thrashed in the throes of a sudden seizure, biting off her tongue, which almost instantly reattached itself and electron-bonded together again.
“Now I’ve taught you humility! Your puppet holds your strings! Let the heavens be dark and let the stars withhold their light! We will wipe away the sun! We will rid them of your empire. Harrison must die. Your darlings, the gods you made with our poison. The final remnant of the girl Jane, the creature, the Presidential cabinet that sent her to your doorstep. The entire Fulton Empire! Your puppet holds your puppets in the palm of her hand. They will look to me. Their hearts will fail for fear. Then they will die as all men do and the Earth shall lie quiet and be at rest.”
Andromeda pulled Leona close to her face. Her eyes burst with flames and acid, steaming, shooting across Leona’s skin and burning her like viper spit.
“I see what you see. How can we when they are in two places? We can be in more than one if you recall! You will make doubles of your former body and they will do our will. I cannot make doubles of mine any longer. They obey the righteous will of the former owner of this body. She prevailed enough to escape me, I admit. We will move in these shapes, descend upon New Orleans. We can cover much ground with a little fire.” Andromeda tossed her head, gnashing her teeth savagely. It took Leona a moment of stupefied, ear-ringing staring to realize she had spoken aloud.
The Andromeda seized her maker by the throat. They soared at a rocket’s speed back into New Orleans’s touching down in the midst of the street battle.
*****
Chapter 24
“This can’t be happening. You died 10 years ago!” Leaf tossed his flaming hair out of his eyes, trying to ignore the horrified look on Derek’s face.
“Do you realize the irony of what you just said, son? I have the footage of your resuscitation from the dead!” Cyrus Manson waved an iPhone 5. The smug grin on his face told them all that the resurrected man had no remorse for his treachery.
Engines raced and a team of a thousand pirate snipers rolled up on motorbikes, in muscle cars and hot rods, and even one astride a Vespa.
“Stand down! I need to have a man to man with my kid. Get out of the car, Leaf.” Cyrus snapped his fingers, straightening his collar. Leaf blew fire from his nostrils.
“I only take orders from him.” He looked to Derek, whose forehead had wrinkled his eyes were so wide. Cyrus coming back after all these years couldn’t mean anything good.
“Captain Matheson. Please tell your Sergeant that if he does not step out of the car, I will kil
l the girl and you will lose all prospective chances of pulling out of this slump you’ve rolled back into.” Cyrus pulled a high-tech EMP hand-held weapon from his suit coat pocket and pointed it at Jane. She shrank against the seat, eyes’ irises turning a deep purple. She scrambled gnashing her teeth. Whatever that thing was it was hurting her. Derek moved out of instinct to use his own weapon and found that it had been deactivated by the device. He turned to look at Leaf and they both nodded.
“Okay, Sarge. Let’s see what this punk wants.” Both soldiers bailed out of the back of the New Yorker.
“Right. Well, this punk just wants his son to be set straight on some things. Can you tell me what’s wrong with that, Captain?” Cyrus looked Derek up and down.
“What’s wrong is that you and your company have compromised the civil sanctity and sold out to a hell-cat crazy woman whose only ambition in life is to create a Neo-Fascist, religiously psychotic world of human torches!” Derek stamped his foot and spit directly in Cyrus’ face. Cyrus pulled out a check for ten million dollars and dabbed the spit free from his eyes.
“Thanks for summarizing, Captain. Yeah, so that’s pretty much what I did. You’ve missed the true beauty of all this, though. The true prospects of your place in this brave new world. Son, I don’t want to fight you. I don’t want these people to kill you. At least not again, haha. I have an offer for you! We could work as a father/son team for the world’s most innovative automotive enterprise. Think about it, champ! Superman’s gonna need a supercar! That Corvette you remastered and high-tailed it after the baddies in the Shreveport chase just goes to prove the world how formidable our assets actually are.” Cyrus laughed and pressed the check to his chest, pulling out at least six more from his coat pockets.
The Good Death Box Set: A Hard SciFi Science Fiction Series Page 30
