Necropolis

by Michael Dempsey

  “Let’s talk about the Lifetaker,” was what I said.

  “The Life—!” Jakob went ballistic. To Maggie: “Are you insane, to tell a human of this?”

  “I had no choice, Jakob,” she said stoically. “He’s returned to Necropolis.”

  “Impossible!”

  “It’s true!”

  “Even if it were, it would still not be for human ears!”

  “We’re beyond all that, goddamn it! He’s killing Surazal scientists. Do you understand? He’s raised the stakes, not us. His existence won’t remain hidden much longer, no matter how desperately you desire it.”

  Jakob stroked his beard furiously, pacing. “He can’t be back. Oh God!”

  “Tell me what you know.” I said.

  The room thickened with his anxiety. “I was part of the group that… took action… when his crimes became known to us.” If Jakob had been human, the beard would’ve come away in clumps.

  “The banishment?” said Maggie.

  “We couldn’t destroy him. That would make us as bad as he was. So we changed him. We changed him so that he could not survive contact with sentient beings in any way. If he couldn’t be near them, he couldn’t destroy them.”

  “Including us?” asked Maggie. “Oh god, you banished him from smarties as well?”

  “We feared he could pollute us somehow with his deviancy.”

  Outcast. Unclean. The smarty reaction hadn’t been much different from humans. “How did you change him?” I asked.

  “A fail-safe program in his core DNA. Proximity to another person would create a complete cascade failure,” Jakob said. “His mind would fragment, he’d break down and die. To survive, he must remain alone. He cannot even communicate from a distance.”

  I saw Maggie shudder. Total isolation.

  “He killed people!” said Jakob. “For the dark pleasure of it! He was an abomination!”

  “Where was he banished to?” I asked.

  “The Blasted Heath.”

  “The wasteland surrounding Necropolis,” Maggie explained.

  “I remember.”

  “A corny name, true,” said Jakob. “Who would spot a reference to H. P. Lovecraft?”

  “Or Shakespeare,” I said. They looked at me. “Macbeth. ‘Upon this blasted heath you stop our way.’”

  “Where on earth did you find this man?” Jakob said to Maggie.

  “I know.”

  “Extraordinary.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m right here,” I said.

  “Pretentious or not,” said Jakob, “it captures the soulless quality of the place.”

  “What was that poem?” asked Maggie. “Remember? About the Lifetaker? The one you used to recite when I was a kid?”

  Jakob nodded, and his eyes went distant.

  “Upon the scorched and blasted heath

  He stands his post of endless hate

  A pallid stain of what’s beneath

  When Death lays claim to hope and fate.

  His cloak of shimmer and of rain

  Flows wild in the bleached-out skies

  He howls his song of rage and pain

  And chaos pours from out his eyes.

  Alone he’ll stand until you’re dust

  And laugh aloud at love’s dark rot.

  He’ll watch the turn of worms and rust

  For he is one whom Time knows not.

  He needs no warmth, he needs no lair

  For he is one whose power lies

  In every creature’s bleak despair

  As chaos pours from out his eyes.

  Love will rise, and so will fall

  He’ll gnaw its bones with sharpened teeth

  And stand his post as Time claims all

  Upon the scorched and blasted heath.”

  “Delightful,” I said.

  “He can’t have returned,” Jakob repeated. “It’d be suicide.”

  “He’s found a way,” said Maggie.

  With that, Maggie unfolded the tale of the shiny shadow seen by herself and Sharon, and the murder of the scientists who worked on the Retrozine formulas. Jakob dropped weakly into one of the leather armchairs. Without his passion, he looked frail.

  “How could this be?”

  “More important is why,” I said. “What’s its agenda?”

  Maggie gave me a sharp look. “Please don’t say ‘it.’ Even if he is a monster, he’s not an ‘it’.”

  My patience was thin as spandex on a fat hooker. “Alright, why would he try to stop the drugs?”

  No one had an answer. Jakob shuffled over to Maggie. He put his hands on her shoulders, patting a rhythm of comfort. “You were right to come to me with this. You’ve done the best you could.” He turned to me. “I’ll make inquiries. Perhaps someone has heard something. In the meantime, we need a way to track him. A daunting task.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Well, Mr. Donner,” said the old smarty, showing me his gray teeth, “how do you track a shadow?”

  44

  “JAKOB”

  After Donner and Maggie left, Jakob paced for a while with his troubled thoughts, then finally gave up and returned to his vessel to rest and recharge.

  It had listened in the shadows.

  Now it moved to the far side of the library, to the carved wooden box that sat on a reading table. It lifted the mahogany lid and withdrew Jakob’s heart. It rotated the silver orb in the lamp light as though trying to read a crystal ball.

  Its eyes closed, and it absorbed everything. Its form changed in a twinkling.

  “Thanks for the memories,” it said.

  And dropped the orb onto the floor, crushing it beneath his heel.

  45

  MCDERMOTT

  The moon undulated beyond the Blister like a dissolving seltzer tablet. Outside the Church of the Holy Epicenter, newspaper skittered across the asphalt. An occasional vehicle hummed overhead on cooling morphinium, but for the most part, the area was as deserted as the Blasted Heath.

  A rat scuttled out from a cluster of garbage cans with a prize: a gristly chicken bone. Halfway across the alley it froze, its whiskers twitching. It sensed a new, less empty kind of silence on the street. The rat abandoned its prize and bolted for cover, its tail rigid as a pencil.

  It had seen something obscuring graffiti on a far patch of brick. A shadow on top of a shadow. The kind of thing that makes you rub your eyes to clear them, look again harder, then nervously dismiss it as a trick of the light.

  It was a trick of the light, but it was also real. Real and not wanting to be seen.

  The street went back to being dead.

  Eventually, the darkness moved, and in its motion resolved into a shape. A human shape. The shape gestured with its hand, two abrupt downward thrusts of an upturned fist. Four more phantoms crept forward out of the gloom. They took equidistant positions around the Church’s delivery doors, holding penumbral weapons.

  The first shadow adjusted his optical mask, zooming to the shops across the street. He focused on an empty storefront window. Within, an Ender sentry was at his observation post. The shadow couldn’t see his own man entering—the team’s polymer body armor absorbed light and energy. So he waited for the signal that the sentry had been neutralized.

  There. A discreet flash of green. They were go.

  Bolt cutters appeared. The lock was cut. The shadows filed silently down into the Church basement, weapons tight against their chests.

  ***

  The team found him huddled on his cot, his legs tucked under an Indian blanket.

  No longer a shadow, McDermott put a hand over the man’s mouth and woke him with a nudge from his weapon. The eyes came awake, then alive with panic. McDermott pulled his visor up. He wanted the man to know who he was. The eyes widened farther, the fear deepening into despair. All struggle seemed to have been sucked from the man’s bones. The man whimpered and tried to scramble backwards, but there was nowhere to go except the cold sto
ne wall behind him.

  McDermott torched him.

  Outside, a second team converged on the Transtar Deluxe. A second Cadre sentry slept within. Had he been awake and on duty like he was supposed to have been, things might have been different. But now it was too late. White lightning arced from their weapons. The vehicle shrieked as its frame superheated. It seemed to swell a moment, the atmosphere inside reaching the ignition point, then it erupted. The heat wave roiled out in all directions, catching wood and metal on fire. The sides of the buildings were instantly scorched. Chunks of cement rained down. The little rat, who’d hidden well, became a knot of roasted bones, a gristly prize for the next scavenger.

  The men kept moving, their suits absorbing the energy that washed over them, no more hazardous than a summer breeze.

  Sounds of battle came from within. The men’s ear buds crackled with McDermott’s voice: “Packages in place. Subjects are trapped in tunnel. All units, withdraw to primary. Repeat, withdraw to primary.”

  Within a minute, both squads were back out on the street.

  Now, the sounds of explosions. First, muffled deep within the building, then a growing cadence of WHU-WHUMPS that culminated in the eruption of the church’s face. Green flame billowed. Blacktop belched upward like a tar bubble, then collapsed in on itself. The loading doors were blasted from their moorings, cartwheeling across the street and through the storefront window. A homeless woman who’d gone unnoticed beneath her newspapers began screaming, her hair on fire.

  Then it was over.

  Of the Church of the Holy Epicenter, formerly Maury’s Deli, there was nothing left but rubble, steam and ash. The only sounds were distant car alarms and the hissing of cooling cement—and a few blocks further, the faint gurgle of the Hudson, which moved serene and uncaring about the violent actions of men.

  McDermott stood in the street, the optical mask around his neck, his need for stealth gone. Moonlight glistened on his scar.

  “Let’s see him come back from that,” he said.

  46

  DONNER

  The lake is glassy and still. Our kayak slices through the water. It’s overcast—it’s been drizzling on and off all morning. To me, it’s perfect.

  “Look,” says Elise, pointing skyward.

  A bird wheels above, the only other living thing in sight, graceful on the air currents. It’s a bird of prey. I can tell that much from the wingspan.

  “Turkey vulture, maybe,” Elise says.

  It ignores us. We, the narrow human blemishes on an otherwise pristine landscape. It scans the waters in search of dinner.

  Elise looks at me over her shoulder, throws me a wink. The weather’s made a beautiful mess of her hair. It wreaths her cold-pinched cheeks like a corona. She laughs in abrupt delight, and it echoes across the lake.

  I’m glad she talked me into coming. I’d balked at the idea of camping. To a city boy like me, the idea of pitching a tent under the stars with only a composting outhouse and a flashlight as my lifelines to civilization filled me with clichéd fears of becoming a mountain lion’s lunch or a hillbilly’s new boyfriend.

  But Elise had proclaimed it the perfect time to escape Manhattan. The summer houses were all closed up, the RVs in storage. Campsites were closing, except for the few that catered to the lunatic fringe, the polar bear dippers and the Jeremiah Johnsons. Campers would be scarce.

  As usual, she’d been right. Out of the eighteen primitive sites in Connecticut’s Pachaug State Forest, maybe five were currently occupied. And all by serious campers—no stoned, boom-boxing teens or wailing infants. We’d enjoyed two days of almost eerie quiet, hiking, eating simple campfire food, and snuggling within our double-wide sleeping bag.

  At night, with that perfect black around us, I could almost forget the unsolved cases that waited for me back home. The primeval silence could almost blot out the voices whispering for retribution.

  Almost.

  I’d bought a hip flask at the corner store before leaving. My first. I filled it with Dewer’s. In the evenings, before the crackling fire, I’d slip some into my coffee—quietly, to avoid Elise’s contracting face.

  Somewhere my mind said, hey, buddy, hidden drinking. Not good. Then it said, hell, just a little fortification in the wilderness. What would a campfire be without whiskey?

  On the lake, she says: Look. An island.

  I peer over her shoulder. The island is small, maybe a couple thousand yards square, dense with scrub and small trees, perfectly framed by the water and the hills of pine beyond.

  I marvel at how we can be the only ones here. We could be pioneers in a virginal America of two hundred years ago. The allure of a simple, rustic life pulls at me for a moment, but even as I enjoy it I know it’s just a fantasy. The people of that time lived brutal, short lives. Things haven’t changed much.

  Elise wants to explore the island. I match her strokes as we approach, then hold my oar flat against the current, just as she taught me. The boat turns in the right direction and I feel absurdly proud of myself. Paul Donner, outdoorsman. We glide to the far side. Lily pads with tiny white flowers cluster in granite alcoves.

  Hey, I say, let’s claim it. We’ll move here. Live off the land. Me Tarzan, you Jane.

  If I remember right, Jane did the hut work while Tarzan was off having adventures.

  Jane big spoil-sport.

  She responds by rocking the kayak a little.

  Hey!

  Dread arcs up my back. I can’t swim. I’d never have agreed to join her out here in this plastic lozenge without the life vest around my chest.

  What? she says, mock-innocent, and rocks the boat some more. Water splashes over the edge, wetting my jeans.

  Not funny. My voice is strangled. The thought of that gray liquid closing over my face…

  Then she issues a little yelp from up front and the landscape tilts wildly and suddenly we ARE in the water, really in the water, the kayak on top of us, the ice-shock of the lake instantly piercing clothes and skin.

  This isn’t happening, I think crazily.

  Help me push it off us, she says, but I’m more concerned with keeping my head above water. The icy water grabs at me, looking for ways in, and I sputter out a mouthful. The lilies have complicated roots below the surface, and my kicking feet are tangling in them. Panic shoots through me.

  Paul, she says more urgently, we have to get the boat off us.

  Okay, I say, and push hard on my end. It flips over, right side up again on the water. I clutch its side, grappling for the raised lip of the seat, looking for anything to hold onto.

  Damn, we lost the oars, I hear her say beyond the thundering of my heart. Sure enough, they’ve floated beyond our reach.

  Then she’s next to me in the water, holding me.

  It’s okay, she says. You’re doing okay. Let the vest do the work. Kick your legs a little.

  That’s what I AM doing, I reply, alarmed by the panic in my own voice. How do we get back in the boat?

  We don’t, she says.

  She’s right. Remounting the kayak would be impossible from the water. It’ll be easier to just hang on and kick ourselves back to shore. I look at the shoreline, so far away, then back to her. She gives me a buoyant smile, but somewhere beneath, something else is going on.

  Suddenly, I’m struck with the strangest thought.

  Elise… you didn’t capsize us on purpose, did you?

  A laugh. Of course not. There was a rock.

  I look deeper into her eyes for reassurance, but there’s this passive-aggressive enjoyment of my panic bleeding from the corners of her face.

  And now I’m aware of her arms around me, her hands on my chest, a moment before so supportive, now hovering too close to the Velcro straps of my life preserver. One tug and those straps will rip right open. I’ll drop like a stone from within, down, down, into the black darkness, while the turkey vulture wheels above, watching me grow smaller and smaller until…

  Elise’s eyes are dark a
nd shiny now, like a doll’s eyes.

  How long, she says, her breath misting over the water’s surface, did you think I was going to wait for you to get your shit together?

  ***

  I came out of one nightmare into another.

  One of men dying.

  A face loomed over me, an alien face of glass and plastic. It jerked backward as my eyes opened. The muzzle of a plasma rifled hurried around to point at my chest.

  I grabbed the barrel out of instinct. We both froze. All he had to do was pull the trigger, but he didn’t. He was green, surprised. It saved me. I torqued up out of my cot. My attacker struggled back to keep his rifle, which pulled me right to my feet. I twisted it in his hands. He cried out and it ripped free.

  We stood like that, me in T-shirt and jeans, he in assault gear.

  Small-arms fire rattled from the sanctuary above. Flashes of plasma strobed around the stairwell door. Splintering wood. Cursing. Screaming. Dying.

  A raid. A Surazal raid, the worst of all worst-case scenarios.

  My assailant grabbed for his sidearm. I fired point-blank at him. The shock wave drove him three feet back, down onto one knee. His suit glowed, managing somehow to absorb the energy. A neat trick. And bad news for me.

  He cursed, smoke curling off him. He reached for his dropped pistol.

  I jumped over the cot. My Beretta was on the milk crate I’d used as a bedside table. Before my assailant could sight his weapon I put three slugs into his chest. His body armor didn’t absorb these nearly as well. He went down, permanently.

  I popped the Beretta’s clip, checked my rounds, snapped it back into place, and moved for the base of the stairs.

  And hesitated.

  Tactically, I was screwed. Running blind up those steps would be crazy without knowing what was beyond the door. But my only alternatives were to remain here and defend the room or retreat down the tunnel, past the power substation, to the other exit I knew existed.

  I couldn’t do either. Not while my friends were up there, fighting and dying.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d picked the crazy play.