“You told me that back at the shelter,” I said. “So who did?”
“The Garden,” the professor whispered.
The pink sun tumbled from the sky like a shooting star, turning day to night in the space of a trembling breath. What rose in its place was a moon made of rotting meat, its vast surface pitted with crawling black mold, glowing in a starless sky.
Young Lauren Carmichael crept from the underbrush with a hooded lantern in her hand, moving swift and sure-footed. Night birds warbled in the dark. We floated behind Lauren as she approached the overgrown and vine-tangled entrance to the unearthed tomb.
“This is the part Eugene Planck didn’t see,” I said. “His memories showed them discovering the door, and how she had Solomon’s ring the next day, but he wasn’t here for this.”
I expected to see Lauren take a machete to the tangled roots. Instead, they moved aside on their own. Vines untwisted and brambles pulled away, parting like the Red Sea for her slow and curious descent. We followed her down, drawn by the firefly glow of her lantern.
Green lichens clung to the ancient stone walls, and soon grass began to spring between the cracks in the floor. Somehow, deep beneath the soil and away from the sun’s light, life thrived in the musty tunnel air. A strange flower rose up from a bed of grass, and I crouched to take a closer look.
It was made of skin.
The flower bent and wilted, its bloody petals glistening, and a nodule of flesh at its tip began to throb and stretch from within. It burst with a wet splurt, spitting yellow pus across the grass. I watched in horror as the blades of grass started to thicken, twist, and sprout tiny pustules of their own.
“Do you know another word for life abundant?” the professor’s voice buzzed in my ear. “We did not build this place. We did not give her the ring.”
“We can go no further!” the suited man cried. “You must be this tall to ride! You must have a body, and we refuse! We are against having bodies!”
“Against having bodies,” I repeated as the world turned fluid and ran like wet paint at the edges. “Against bodies. You’re anti…”
I blinked.
“You’re antibodies.”
We stood in a laboratory, invisible and bodiless amid huge stainless-steel vats and racks of elaborate industrial tools. Nedry and Clark were there, though they both looked younger, like they’d come fresh out of college, and they were in a shouting match with a man I’d never seen before. He looked too laid-back for the room, with his gray hair tied back in a ponytail and his open lab coat draped over ragged jeans and a tie-dye T-shirt. Their words were muffled, impossible to make sense of, as if they were talking underwater.
I felt us slide in time, like squeezing through a tunnel of vinyl coated in warm grease. Green droplets dribbled from a palmed plastic tube, blending into a cup of coffee. We slid through time again, five minutes into the future-past, and the coffee came with us. I shouted for the ponytailed man not to drink it, but my words spilled out in the shape of soap bubbles and popped helplessly on the floor.
“Hey, buddy,” Clark said pleasantly, rubbing the man’s shoulders. “You okay? You look sick.”
The man frowned, three shades of color draining from his face in the space of a breath.
“I…do feel a little nauseous, yes. Must have been something I ate.”
“You should go home,” Clark said. “Nedry and I can handle the next round of trials. Go on. It’s okay.”
A train blasted through the laboratory wall, trailing streamers of light. In its wake we stood in a desolate subway station lined with dingy olive tiles. The crumpled front page of the New York Post blew past my shoes on a gust of cold wind. The ponytailed man checked his watch and walked into the men’s room. We followed.
He was alone, splashing water on his face from the grime-smeared sink under the buzzing glow of a flickering light sconce. He looked at himself in the long row of mirrors, touching his pallid cheeks with shaky fingers.
Nedry casually strolled into the bathroom, stood at the sink next to him, and started washing his hands.
“Hey, Bob,” he said.
“Nedry? What are you—”
The ponytailed man—Bob—froze. He looked from the reflection in the mirror to the actual sink on his right. Nobody was there.
Nedry’s reflection turned off his faucet and shook droplets of water from his hands. The droplets spattered against the inside of the mirror, like rain on a windshield.
“Bad news, Bob. Word from the top. We have to downsize the team. Looks like you’re the first casualty.”
Bob’s hands flew up, fingers hooked in a ritual gesture I knew well: the first step of a warding spell. He didn’t have time to finish.
The mirror exploded.
Shards of broken glass sliced across his face and chest. One jagged chunk impaled his arm down to the bone, and he tumbled to the filthy floor. The door to the restroom swung open, and a man in a hoodie and dark glasses speed-walked in. As he got close, I recognized Clark’s face. Clark dipped down, picked up a shard of glass from the ground—one with a long, sharp tip—and bent over Bob.
He drove the shard into Bob’s chest, again and again, as Nedry watched with glee from a ragged chunk of mirror at the edge of the buckled frame. Nedry’s head dipped out of sight, then reappeared again a second later.
“Security guard just walked past the mirror over the ticket gate,” he said. “You’ve got twenty seconds of clear space between here and the loading platform. Go!”
Clark dropped the shard and dug in his pockets, pulling on heavy winter gloves instead of taking time to wash the blood from his hands. He strode back out as briskly as he’d come in, as if nothing had happened.
The smoke-faced men hovered on either side of the fallen victim, their dangling feet an inch above the spreading pool of blood and shattered glass.
“Find our father,” they buzzed in unison.
Twenty-Two
“What, him?” I said, nodding down at the body. “You want me to find a dead man?”
“He is not dead,” the professor said. “Find his grave, and you will see.”
I lay in Jennifer’s bed. She handed me a slice of orange.
The orange burst between my teeth, and the juice rolled down my tongue like a first drink of water after a week in the desert. Jennifer’s hand left little trails of light in its wake, but they sparked and faded fast.
“You steady there, sugar?” she asked. “Think you’re coming out of it now. Eat up. Vitamin C makes for a smoother landing.”
I didn’t have to be told. The last traces of the psilocybin pumping through my veins turned the slice of orange into a symphony.
“You get what you needed?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I croaked, learning to use my voice again. “No. Sort of. I’m not sure. What time is it?”
She glanced at her wrist. “Little after three. You’ve been out for a few hours.”
I groaned. Longer than I’d wanted to spend in a drug-induced haze, but at least I had something resembling a lead. Assuming, of course, that the smoke-faced men weren’t walking me into a trap just like they’d manipulated Lauren. But I had to check it out. Didn’t have a whole lot in the way of alternatives.
I pushed myself up, willing my stubborn muscles back to life. “Need to get in touch with Pixie.”
Jennifer gave her hair a little flip. “Yeah? Say hey for me, all right?”
“Jennifer,” I said, catching her tone, “we already talked about this. Pix is straight edge. She’s not going to work for a drug dealer.”
“Work, nothin’. That girl is fine. You ever find out what team she’s playing for, you let me know.”
I called Pixie on my way downstairs. She told me she was on her way to St. Jude’s to start prep work for the evening meal. I arranged to meet her there in twenty minutes and hoped I didn’t get conscripted into peeling potatoes.
I walked out under the watchful gaze of the Cinco Calles, feeling eyes on the b
ack of my neck. The kid on the street gave me a nod and gestured to my car. Untouched, like he promised. I started up the Barracuda’s ignition and the radio came on, tuned to the hourly news. My ears perked up.
“—raid of a homeless shelter resulted in the rescue of nine people who were allegedly being kept in a makeshift prison cell. The prisoners, who were heavily drugged so they could not identify their abductors, have been taken to local hospitals. An official statement came from FBI Special Agent Harmony Black.”
Harmony’s voice drifted from my car speakers. “Thanks to the efforts of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, we were able to take decisive action. We believe that the prisoners were being forced to compete in what the perpetrators called a ‘bum fight club,’ streamed to a paying audience over the Internet. At this time we cannot release any names or details about the persons responsible—”
I flipped over to the blues station, swapping Agent Black for a crooning Billie Holiday.
“Couldn’t even give me a thank-you call,” I muttered as I put Jennifer’s fortress in my rearview mirror. It was a good bit of spin, I had to admit, with an explanation just sleazy enough to be believable. The media had the attention of a gnat hopped up on raw sugar. A week from now, nobody would think to follow up on the story.
Pixie waited for me on the sidewalk outside St. Jude’s, wearing an army surplus canvas backpack and pacing a groove in the concrete. I guessed she’d heard the news, too.
“So how much of that was total bullshit?” were the first words out of her mouth.
“Ninety-nine percent of it. Only true part is that they got nine people out, plus the two who left with me. Some of the others didn’t make it. Anyway, job’s not done.”
“No kidding it isn’t. I know thirty people who disappeared, and that’s just our regulars. There’s no telling how many people are still missing all over the city.”
It’s not our only clinic, Nedry had said back at the standoff.
“That’s not all,” Pixie said. “Remember how I broke down the whole Nevada Heritage Coalition thing for you? They cut ties. According to the state records, all of a sudden there’s no connection between the NHC and the McMillan Trade Group at all. The paper trail’s been destroyed, real names scrubbed from corporate charters and replaced with bogus ones. It’s a total burn job.”
“How?” I said. We walked into St. Jude’s, swapping the arid heat outside for the muggy, wet heat inside.
“Senator Roth has a hacker who’s as good as me,” she said. “Or better. No. Just as good. Maybe a little less.”
“Okay, I get the idea. I’ve got a lead, but I need help. Can you do some research for me?”
“Normally I’d make a comment about not being your personal Google,” she said. “But for this I’ll make an exception.”
We set up camp at an empty table, and she slid her laptop out of her backpack.
“Search for articles on, what was it called, Ausar Biomedical? From about twenty years ago, just before the big scandal. I’m looking for pictures of their research staff. Especially anyone named Nedry, Clark, or Bob.”
“Anyone named Bob?” Pixie said, arching an eyebrow. “Real specific there, Faust.”
I shrugged. “It’s what I’ve got to work with.”
It took her less than three minutes to hit pay dirt, pulling up an archived Time magazine article. The grainy scanned photo showed the three men standing side by side—all smiles, with Nedry still wearing his mirrored glasses—in the laboratory the smoke-faced men had showed me.
“The future’s so bright, they’ve got to wear shades,” the caption read. “Pictured: Dr. Francis Nedry, Dr. Noah Clark and Dr. Bob Payton of Ausar Biomedical, celebrating the FDA’s approval to begin human trials of the eagerly anticipated fertility drug Viridithol. Industry insiders have named Ausar as this year’s hot stock to watch.”
“Who are these guys?” Pixie said.
“The two on the left are serious bad news. It’s Payton I’m interested in. He was stabbed to death in a subway bathroom, probably not long after this picture was taken. I think—”
I paused, straining to remember the vision. It all felt so far away now, slipping from my memory like strands of gossamer. I’d seen the newspaper blow by, past a pillar, under a slate-gray sign…
“The Canarsie Line,” I said. “I think it’s in New York.”
Her fingers rattled the keyboard. She frowned.
“Correct on the location, but negative on the crime. I’ve got nothing even close to a men’s-room stabbing here. You sure that’s where he died?”
He is not dead, they’d told me. Find his grave, and you will see.
“Try this,” I said. “Just look for an obituary or a burial notice for Payton. Forget the stabbing part.”
“This is now officially weird.” Pixie squinted at her screen. “You’re certain he was murdered?”
“Watched it happen.”
She turned, pushed her Buddy Holly glasses down on her nose, and stared at me over the rims.
“I wasn’t there there,” I said. “Forget it, it’s complicated. Why, what did you find?”
“No police record of his death, but he does have an obituary. It ran in the Oakland Tribune. Guess he was from around there originally. Talks about how he got his PhD from UC Berkeley and moved back to New York to get in on the ground floor with Ausar.”
“Does it say how he died?” I said, leaning in to read over her shoulder.
She shook her head. “Not a word. Just says he had no surviving family, no spouse or kids. He was interred at Sunset Rest in El Cerrito. What are you going to do, go dig him up?”
I didn’t answer right away. She looked over at me.
“Tell me,” she said, “you’re not going to go dig him up.”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” I said, turning the pieces over in my mind. “There’s nothing buried there but an empty casket. The Ausar brain trust had a falling out just before the Viridithol scandal. Nedry and Clark tried to assassinate Bob Payton, but they didn’t stick around to see the aftermath. I think he survived the stabbing. He knew he was in over his head, and he faked his death and went into hiding so they wouldn’t take a second shot at him.”
“What difference does it make?” Pixie said. “What does this have to do with my missing people?”
“It’s all connected. Ausar Biomedical, Lauren Carmichael, Senator Roth, the missing people, all of it. Twenty years ago, Nedry, Clark, and Payton were messing with something they should have left alone. Now the experiments are starting again, bankrolled by Carmichael-Sterling and greased by Roth’s political influence. They’re all after the same thing.”
“What?” Pixie said.
I thought back to the prison cell and that mutated, twisted creature that had been an innocent man before Nedry went to work on him. The vision of Lauren descending into the tomb, its ancient stones bristling with grass and flowers made of flesh.
“Something terrible,” I said.
• • •
Two hundred bucks bought me a window seat on a jet to Oakland International. It was only an hour and a half away from Vegas, the kind of flight where you spend more time on the runway than you do in the air. I didn’t bring luggage.
I rented a little red Altima and set the GPS for Berkeley. I made it just in time to catch the sun setting over the San Francisco Bay, turning the cloudy sky and the clear water into sheets of hammered gold. My stomach was grumbling, so I headed for the Gourmet Ghetto on Shattuck and Vine, on the north side of town. Besides, I needed less light in the sky before I could take care of business.
I ended up at La Fable, a cute little bistro on Walnut Street, and sat under an umbrella on the patio with a menu in one hand and a whiskey sour in the other. The Bourbon whiskey, laced with lemon juice and sugar, went down with a smooth heat and helped me think. The strains of a jazz quartet drifted up from the street as the lights of the city—and out in the distance, the sprawl of San Francisco—blaze
d against the falling night.
Lauren and the science boys at Ausar were on the same mission. The linking element was Senator Roth. I wondered if they’d discovered their common interests when she bribed him into sending the feds after Nicky and decided to hitch their wagons together. The one thing I knew for certain was that Bob Payton wanted nothing to do with it. He’d created the smoke-faced men as some sort of antibody, a cure against what his old colleagues were planning, though it hadn’t done a hell of a lot of good. Given that they’d almost started the apocalypse, their idea of a cure was worse than the disease.
Payton could tell me what I wanted to know. And he would, once I got my hands on him. Down to every last detail.
I ordered the moules frites and switched to sparkling water for the rest of the meal. It was my old habit before a job from my days of working for Nicky: one stiff drink, then nothing but water. Just enough to get me limber but not sloppy.
The waitress brought me a plate of black-shelled mussels in a cream sauce, along with a side of fries. There’s nothing like fresh seafood, so juicy and tender you can smell the ocean salt with every bite. I idly stirred a fry in the mussel sauce and glanced at my watch, pacing myself. I was going in blind tonight. I hated going in blind.
Once I decided it was late enough and I’d had enough of mussels and jazz, I paid my check. El Cerrito was thirteen minutes north of Berkeley, most of it a straight shot along SR-123. I drove five miles over the speed limit and took my time.
I’d never broken into a cemetery before. There’s a first time for everything.
Twenty-Three
Sunset Rest was a one-stop shop for the dead. Wrought-iron fences curled along rolling lawns studded with monuments in marble and basalt, salt-and-pepper memorials to the fallen. Its sprawling chapel arch overlooked a tranquil pond. Tiled outcroppings and concealed pumps created perpetual miniature waterfalls that burbled in the dark. The polished granite walls of the mausoleum leaned in over the chapel’s shoulder, as if hungry for more bodies to stuff inside its endless niches.
Office hours ended at five, and the cemetery gates locked at sunset. Unless somebody was burning the midnight oil, I’d only have rent-a-cops to worry about. I parked the Altima on the street a block away and hopped the fence.
Daniel Faust 03 - The Living End Page 14
