Daniel Faust 03 - The Living End

by Craig Schaefer

  “Bold words, but I can hear your heartbeat. I can taste your fear on every petal of my body. All this aggression, and for what? You should be welcoming me. Celebrating.”

  “Call me crazy,” I said, “but I’m not seeing anything to celebrate here.”

  “No? This world is choked with evil, Mr. Faust. Drowning in it. It’s everywhere you see. But where is the grace? Where is the touch of a loving creator? I will be that creator. I will begin with a purge. A small one, just enough to lower the planet’s population to more reasonable levels, room for my garden to grow.”

  “You’re talkin’ about genocide,” Jennifer said.

  “No, child. Genocides are targeted. They are actions of hate. My purge will be as indiscriminate as a plague, taking life without pattern or malice. Meanwhile, I will topple the institutions that helped drive this world into ruin. Every government, every church, and every bank, every dividing line that ever separated human from human will wither under my hand. Imagine it! No more wars, no hatred, no famine or fear. No child will ever go to bed with an empty stomach. No one will lack a roof over their heads.”

  “Sweet deal,” I said flatly. “And it only costs a few billion lives and humanity’s freedom. Forever.”

  “I am a merciful goddess,” Lauren said. “Let me prove it to you. Kneel down. Kneel down and worship me, and I will spare your lives. I will fill you with what I am, and send you forth as my first ambassadors to the world.”

  I looked over at Jennifer, deadpan. “What do you think? Wanna go for it?”

  “Sweetie, I like to think my taste in goddesses is a little more upscale. She ain’t a stitch on Bast or Hecate.”

  “Yeah.” I folded my arms across my chest. “I’ve just never been much for going to church, myself. Sorry, Lauren, we’ll pass. We’re shutting this little freak show down, right here and now.”

  Lauren giggled. An uneasy feeling crept up my spine.

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course. I forgot. Because you turned Alton Roth against me, and he’s been spending the better part of the day slowly pulling my soldiers out from under me.”

  Now the uneasy feeling turned into a hand of ice.

  The fire-escape door banged open, and mercenaries filled the room. Angus Caine strode out ahead of his men, eight or nine of them. Enough for a firing squad. The mercs leveled their rifles. I raised my open hands. Jennifer did the same, keeping the barrel of her revolver pointed toward the ceiling. The grizzled man curled his lips into a nasty smile.

  “Like I told you, boy,” he said. “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but I’d have you. I’d have your heart on a fuckin’ plate.”

  “Roth’s deception was…charmingly incompetent,” Lauren explained. “It wasn’t hard to discern his plan. He failed to learn from history. For instance, consider the mercenary condottieri of Renaissance Italy. They were powerful tools for warring city-states, but dangerous ones. It wasn’t uncommon for them to switch sides, literally in the middle of a battle. Sometimes more than once.”

  “The lady made us a better offer,” Angus said. “So we decided to stick around and finish the job we were paid for.”

  “That wasn’t my entire plan,” I said.

  “No,” Lauren agreed. She pointed toward the bank of security monitors. One in the corner flickered to a new broadcast. “I believe this was.”

  They’d captured Meadow Brand.

  One mercenary held her with her arms pinned behind her back, another keeping his rifle trained at her head as she struggled to pull free. A third looked up into the camera, holding up a detonator. When he spoke, his voice echoed from the walkie-talkie on Angus’s hip.

  “Sir! We found the target on the fifth floor, planting C-4 charges. All explosives have been recovered and disarmed.”

  The vines hoisted Lauren back into the air. She hovered, her thorny feet dangling a yard above the marble floor, and smiled serenely down at us.

  “You tried to send away my men,” she said, “to prevent the sacrifice. You tried to use the treacherous Ms. Brand to destroy the harnessing pattern. And you failed at both gambits. Utterly.”

  I bit my bottom lip, almost hard enough to taste blood. My gaze turned to the security monitors. This was it. All chips in on the last hand of the night.

  “How delightful,” Lauren said. “The great Daniel Faust, the trickster magician, caught with an empty sleeve. I wish you could see the look on your face right now, I really do. I’ll savor its memory.”

  Movement on one camera, the view of the outside lot, caught my eye.

  I smiled.

  “Hey, ‘Eve,’” I said. “Think you’ve got some uninvited guests.”

  Now they were on three monitors. Teams of men in uniform black, huddled down behind riot shields, forcing their way into the Enclave lobby. A tear-gas grenade exploded on one camera, blanketing the lens in white smoke. On the parking lot view, a swarm of police cruisers ringed the building.

  “Oh, hey,” I said. “Looks like the whole Vegas Metro SWAT division is here. Plus the FBI, Homeland Security, and probably the IRS for good measure.”

  Lauren shook her head wildly. Her plants quivered. “What? How? They have no reason to be here, no evidence against me! They have no right!”

  “Yeah,” I said, “funny story about that…”

  • • •

  On my list of things to do earlier that afternoon, one had involved sitting in a small, windowless interrogation room, drinking stale coffee across from Harmony Black. Meadow sat to my left, looking pained.

  “Obviously,” Harmony said, setting a tape recorder on the steel table, “any references to magic aren’t going to fly. Just don’t talk about those parts.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Meadow snapped. “I know the rules. Do we have a deal or not?”

  Harmony took a deep, centering breath and slid a manila folder across the table, pushing it in front of her.

  “It’s all there. The DA just signed off on it. You will receive full immunity and placement in witness protection, in exchange for testimony leading to Lauren Carmichael’s conviction.”

  Meadow yanked the folder open and snatched up the papers inside, speed-reading them.

  “Can’t believe you talked me into this,” Meadow grumbled at me.

  “That makes two of us,” Harmony said, shooting me a hard look. “And I’m still not happy about keeping Roth’s name out of this. He should go down with Lauren.”

  I sipped my lukewarm coffee. “I don’t disagree. Just not like this. Look, once you get your hooks into Carmichael-Sterling, the odds are pretty good you’ll find something leading to his front door. I just can’t be involved in that part.”

  “Why not?”

  “Reasons,” I said, and set my cup down.

  Meadow tapped her fingernails against the papers. “All right. Let’s get this over with. What do you want to know?”

  Harmony pressed the red button and moved the recorder to the middle of the table.

  “Everything. Let’s start at the beginning. What is your relation to the Carmichael-Sterling Group?”

  “On paper? Director of public relations. That was just to keep the money clean. I kill people. For Lauren Carmichael. First time was…hmm, remember back in ’08, Ken Sterling’s murder-suicide? The one that gave Lauren full control of the company? That was me. Took a Jet Ski and boarded Sterling’s yacht. I shot him and his wife in bed. The kid ran. Found him hiding in a closet. I didn’t bother dragging him out. I just shot through the door. That’s a detail they didn’t release to the newspapers, so there ya go.”

  “Jesus,” Harmony breathed. “You can prove Lauren hired you?”

  “Always figured she’d turn on me eventually, so I documented everything as an insurance policy. Oh, her dead husband and son? Not a home invasion. Lauren did the job. I was her getaway driver on that one, and I furnished the alibi. I’ve got a recording of her talking about it. What do you want next, the details on the city inspectors we bribed to get the Enclave
’s permits rushed through, or the honest one whose throat I slit when he wouldn’t play ball? Or we can talk about some tortured and dead bums, and yes, I do know where the bodies are buried.”

  An hour later, she was finally finished. Harmony shut off the tape recorder. She stood on shaky legs, her cheeks pale, and gestured for me to follow her. Meadow sat placidly at the interrogation-room table as we stepped out into the hall.

  “Jesus, Faust,” Harmony hissed. “I thought she was just going to confess to some kidnappings. I just gave blanket immunity to a fucking serial killer!”

  “So redact half of it. Lose chunks of the tape. It’ll still be plenty of ammo against Lauren, and it won’t hurt your career.”

  “That isn’t remotely the fucking point! That woman is a goddamn monster, and now I have to let her walk!”

  I got close to her, close enough to smell the scent of faded flowers on her skin, and whispered, “I need you to trust me. If it was for anything else, any other reason, I wouldn’t blame you for laughing in my face, but this is just too big. We have to work together. There’s no other way.”

  Harmony stared at the two-way mirror. Behind the glass, Meadow leaned back and put her feet up on the interrogation-room table. It looked like she was whistling.

  “You bring her back here,” Harmony said, not looking at me. “You make sure she testifies. I want her in a courtroom. I want to be certain the charges against Carmichael stick.”

  “Lauren won’t get away. So does this give you enough probable cause to raid the Enclave and get those hostages out?”

  She nodded. Her eyes narrowed. “My next stop is a friendly judge with a pen and a search warrant. We’ll hit the place tonight. Don’t be anywhere nearby when it happens. Or better yet, do. I’d love to arrest you right alongside Lauren.”

  • • •

  “Those aren’t some third-world scrubs with broken AKs, like you’re used to fighting,” I told Angus Caine. “Those are the toughest cops in Vegas, and they’re rolling out all the party favors. Seems to me you’ve got two choices: one, you can get in a gunfight with the United States government—because that always ends well—or you can run downstairs, get as many of your boys out through the emergency exits as you can, and order the rest to surrender. Your call, but bail money’s a lot cheaper than a tombstone.”

  Angus’s lips curled into a furious snarl. “You little gob of shite—”

  “Yeah, I get that a lot. Oh, hey, Lauren, speaking of not learning from history? Check out that screen in the corner.”

  The mercenaries on five were still struggling with Meadow, waiting for their orders. They hadn’t twigged that something was a little off about her. The way she kept making the same movements, over and over again, or how her eyes were expressionless.

  “Don’t you remember this trick?” I said. “It’s the one you used on me, when you murdered our buddy Spengler.”

  Suddenly it wasn’t Meadow anymore. The puppet’s head lolled back, opening a hinged mouth to expose a painted sigil that glistened with malevolent energy. The mercenaries had only a second to react before white-hot light flashed from the sigil’s heart. The camera went dead.

  Meadow—the real Meadow—stepped into view on a totally different screen. She held up her detonator box in one hand, and stuck up her middle finger with the other.

  “I reckon that’s her resignation,” Jennifer said.

  The marble shook under our feet. One after another, explosions boomed from the floors below, blasting out windows and spewing glass and fire into the night.

  “She wasn’t planting the explosives on the fifth floor,” I said. “She was planting them on the third, the seventh, the thirteenth, and the twenty-third.”

  Forty-Four

  “Just a little C-4 in strategic spots,” I said as the rumbling subsided. “Not enough to bring the building down or cut off the exits, but it should do a pretty good job of disrupting the mystic circuitry. Sorry, Lauren. The Enclave was a massive energy funnel, but now it’s just another slab of overpriced real estate.”

  “No sacrifice, and no way to reap the power,” Jennifer said, nodding. “You’re finished. Look on the bright side. Maybe you’ll find a nice greenhouse with cheap rent.”

  Caine took a step back and drew his sidearm.

  “Move out, lads! We’re leaving. But not before I take care of unfinished business.”

  A helicopter’s spotlight dropped into view, hovering outside the penthouse windows. The blinding beam flooded the room with brilliant white light. Then the helicopter swung around, turning its open side door to face us. Not a police helicopter. Nicky Agnelli’s big yellow Bell 407, its tail registry blotted out under a fresh coat of paint.

  I had just enough time to grab Jennifer’s arm and yank her to the floor before Juliette opened fire.

  She sat at the edge of the open door, cradling a long-barreled monster of a machine gun while her sister flew the helicopter. The windows exploded in a hurricane of glass, and lead sprayed across the room like a swarm of angry hornets. Bullets punched into the Viridithol tank, rupturing holes and sending streams of the toxic venom squirting across the marble floor. Two of the mercenaries dropped, and the others scattered, falling back toward the emergency exit.

  Angus threw up a panicked arm and raised his gun with the other hand, but Jennifer was faster on the draw. Her bullet slammed into his shoulder, shredding camo and bursting out the other side. His face contorted as he dropped his gun and ran, leading a stumbling retreat. Nedry just lay flat on the ground with his hands over his head, shrieking like a two-year-old.

  The gun’s belt ran dry, and the shooting stopped. If Lauren had even been hit, she didn’t show it. The vines lowered her to the ground, and she bellowed with a fury I’d never heard before. The foliage rustled, and her vengeance slithered forth.

  Snakes. A living carpet of them, hundreds, short and long and tiny and fat, and every one of them venomous, every one of them heading straight toward Jennifer and me.

  Nedry caught sight of the snakes and jumped to his feet, screaming, “Fuck this job! Lauren, I quit!”

  He threw himself at the ruptured tank. His open palm hit the mirror-polished surface and pushed right on through. His body flattened and became an image on the other side, a reflection with no source.

  Jennifer ran to the shattered windows while I searched for a way to stop the writhing hordes. The tank caught my eye. Viridithol pooled on the marble floor, catching in the chiseled glyphs and running along them in channels, coloring them bile green.

  Have to be careful with my aim, I remembered Bob Payton saying as he walked around his candle-lit circle. This stuff is flammable as hell.

  I conjured a spark of raw power to my fingertip and flicked it through the air. It sailed, slow and serene, gliding like a fireplace ember to land in the pooled serum.

  It ignited like gasoline.

  I wasn’t sure if the snakes were screaming, or if Lauren was, but the air filled with a shrill cacophony as her pets broiled under a wall of fire. Juliette clung to the helicopter door, leaning out, and swung a white vinyl bowling-ball bag through the air. Jennifer caught it and tossed it my way. As the helicopter launched straight up, vanishing from sight, I saw Lauren lift her hand and point at me through the crackling flames.

  “You die here, Faust! I’m taking you with me!”

  The elevator doors chimed pleasantly and slid open. Meadow Brand stepped out and raised her hands like a showgirl at the front of a chorus line. A pack of animated mannequins charged out around her, storming though the fire, heading straight for Lauren.

  “Ta-daa,” Meadow sang.

  I unzipped the bowling-ball bag. Bob Payton’s severed head rested inside, the pallid skin of his neck ringed with binding seals and the stump cauterized with a blowtorch. I grabbed the head by the hair and held it aloft, unleashing the spell I’d been fueling under my breath, the trigger for the ritual I’d carried out over Payton’s corpse back in New York.

  The
stitches over its eyes and mouth tore apart as the head woke up.

  Payton’s dead eyes blazed with black light, and he bellowed with a voice like thunder, the concentrated entropy desperate to feast.

  The mannequins’ wooden shells ignited as they charged through the flames, and they threw themselves onto Lauren like they were trying to hug their long-lost mother. Others ran headlong into the greenery behind her, setting leaves and bushes alight. Her vines lashed through the air, catching one stray mannequin and smashing it to kindling, but she couldn’t shake them all off.

  I threw Payton’s head. It sailed across the room, landing at the foot of Lauren’s steel throne, and burst open. A vortex of snarling purple light whipped around her, wilting flowers, melting brambles to rancid goo. The rose in Lauren’s eye socket withered and turned black. She screamed, stumbling backward, thrashing against the burning mannequins.

  “Jen?” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Now shoot her.”

  Jennifer took aim and snapped off five shots. One at the glass window behind Lauren, and four into the burning woman’s chest, pushing her toward it.

  The last of the purple light flickered and died. I saw Lauren, just for one split second, in its wake. Not a transformed monster, not consumed by the Garden’s plants, not anything at all. Just a would-be goddess with a shattered throne.

  The cracked window gave under the mannequins’ weight, and she fell with them, smoldering and broken, thirty-six floors to the concrete below.

  I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. We just ran for the fire escape.

  We went up, not down, emerging onto the windy rooftop. A cold night breeze whipped through my hair. The helicopter was waiting for us, just as planned, with the twins on pilot duty. I clambered into the back row of seats, and Meadow got in next to me, with Jennifer taking a seat in front. She slammed the door shut behind us.

  “Agnelli Airlines, cleared for takeoff!” Juliette chirped as the helicopter lifted from the roof. “Sorry, there will be no movie on this flight.”