Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

  She looked up into his eyes as if searching for something. At last, she nodded and took a deep breath. “I’m going away,” she said, “some place far away where even Eternal Life can’t reach me. There are people who will help me for a price. They can get the monitor off my ka and give me a new identity north of the Seattle Firewall. There’s clean wilderness up there, beyond the jurisdiction of the Empire and the power of Eternal Life. A person can lose herself there and start all over.”

  “Why? Who are these people?” Harry asked, careful to keep his voice neutral.

  She studied him warily, trying to gauge how much to tell him. At last she said, “I’m leaving tonight, and I want you with me.”

  Harry stepped back and the breath whooshed out of his lungs. He felt as if he’d just been gut punched. Things were moving too fast. Was she asking him to go with her?

  Susan read the look on his face and shook her head. “Not like that,” she said with a sad, knowing smile. “I know it’s all over between us that way, too much dirty water under the bridge. I need you there to…” she waved her hand vaguely. “To make sure nothing happens.”

  “You don’t trust these people?”

  “I’d feel better if you were there.”

  “Susan, if you have to get away I can get you…”

  Susan put a gloved finger on his lips and silenced him. “It’s all arranged. Just be there for me tonight. If you think there’s something wrong, I’ll pull out. I promise.”

  She looked fearfully up and down the street. “Harry, I gotta go now,” she said and began to pull back into the car. “Just say yes or no. Either way I’ll understand, but please don’t tell anyone about meeting me today, promise.”

  Harry sighed resignedly. “Okay, just say where you want to meet.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “Thank you,” she said and reached into the car and opened her purse that lay on the seat beside her. She took out a piece of paper and a pen and quickly scribbled instructions. “I’ll be waiting for you here, tonight, at eleven thirty. From there we’ll go to meet my contacts.”

  She folded the paper and slipped it into Harry’s hand, closing his fingers around it with her own. She held his hand like that for a moment and looked up at him. “Please don’t fail me,” she said and drew back into the dark interior and pulled the door shut. A moment later the car whined softly as it rose a few feet into the air and then shot away, climbing into the afternoon traffic.

  Harry stared thoughtfully at the black limousine as it climbed into the distance and at last disappeared around a corner. Even after it disappeared, he remained standing there, sorting through his thoughts and feelings. Something wasn’t right about Susan or her story. He remembered the indefinable sense of wrongness he felt when he held her. A quiet voice inside warned him to be careful, and he had learned from experience to listen to that quiet voice because it was seldom wrong.

  On the other hand, this was Susan, and she needed his help. It wasn’t something he could easily refuse. He carried a heavy burden of guilt for all that he had put her through. His blind stupidity had almost killed her and his drinking and womanizing had killed her love and thrown her into the arms of Roger, who had…Once again he saw her battered face, the deep gash across her cheekbone, the dark bruises on her neck. He closed his eyes but the image remained to haunt him. There was no way he could have said no to her…and she knew it.

  After a while, he unfolded the paper and looked at what Susan had written. It was a set of grid coordinates for the automatic navigating system in his car, followed by what to do when he got there. Harry was familiar enough with the coordinates of the area to know that these were nowhere in New Hollywood. In fact, it looked like they were somewhere in the Sinks!

  Just looking at them brought on that old, familiar, falling down an elevator shaft feeling. He hadn’t been near the Sinks since that disastrous night seven years ago. Why did it have to be the Sinks, but he knew why. Where else were you going to get somebody to take out the monitor on your ka, get you past the Seattle Firewall, and give you a new identity? Any one of the rogue Tongs, Slavers, or even Seraphim could probably do it. All you needed was money, lots of money.

  The only question was why would they even bother to keep their side of the bargain? Why not just take her money and then sell her south to one of the Slaver plantations in the Burn or maybe ransom her back to Roger…probably not a good idea knowing Roger…better to just deep-six her in the Trench.

  And that’s where I come in, Harry thought. I’m probably supposed to prevent all that. He shook his head. Susan, I think you’ve got me mixed me up with that blockbuster hero I once thought I was, but who never really existed outside of a whiskey bottle.

  15

  Black Ice Hype

  Harry carefully refolded the piece of paper with the coordinates and stuck it in his pocket along with Jericho’s note. One mystery on top of another, he thought.

  He decided to walk to Chueh’s. He needed time to think. He called his car on his wrist phone and had it return to the parking garage until further notice. Then he strolled leisurely down the street beneath the sun-dappled shadows of over-arching trees. With his battered baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes and the dark sunglasses on, he was comfortably anonymous in the late afternoon crowd that brushed by.

  He stopped in front of a brightly colored store display and stood, looking without really seeing it. He took out the little plastic heart and held it in the light so that he could see the two tiny figures standing in its center, laughing happily for the camera. How young and innocent they looked, he thought, and suddenly felt a thousand years old by comparison. He knew that if he pressed the back they would both come to life, laughing and singing and mugging for the camera.

  He remembered the day it had been taken as if it was yesterday. They had gone to the beach, out on the newly constructed boardwalk, eating hot dogs and ice cream. Just being together, in love, made the day magic. The sky was an infinite blue and the sea sparkled like diamonds. They had kissed and held hands and talked and laughed. Later, they swam in the moonlight and made love on the deserted beach with the distant glow of the boardwalk lights stretching out into the dark sea.

  He suddenly remembered something else and his hand tightened around the plastic heart. “How did you know, Susan?” he asked looking at his closed fist. “How did you know that I would be coming out of Eternal Life by that side door? I didn’t even know until five minutes before.” It had been a spur of the moment decision after talking to Gibson. Yet Susan had been waiting for him. She even had time to find someone to intercept him. He opened his fist and stared at the holographic image. “How, Susan?” he asked, but Susan, frozen in time, looked out at him and laughed in the first flush of true love.

  At last, resignedly, he pocketed the locket and looked up. He caught his reflection in the plate glass window and behind it…he stared at the reflection of the building across the street. It was one of the new Wolf Temples that were springing up all over the city. Religion had become one of the newest fads of the in-crowd and their wannabe hangers-on, especially this religion that offered the sacrament of black ice, one of the newest, nastiest drugs on the market. It was rumored it came out of the Sinks.

  The Wolf Temple was a four-story, black marble cube, built on the same franchise model as all the other Wolf Temples in the city. It had no windows or decoration of any kind, just a broad, black marble staircase, leading up to a pair of inset brass doors at least ten feet high. A wolf’s head pushed out through the center of each door as if the beasts had run headlong into them while the metal was still soft.

  Harry turned and stared at those doors. Even at a distance, across a busy street, they filled him with atavistic fear as he remembered the black, ragbag shape that chased his ka down the resurrection trail and marked him with its claws. Before he got a glimpse of the true horror of what it really was, it looked just like a large, black timber wolf, like the one pus
hing through those doors.

  At that moment, the wolf doors opened and a man stepped out. He put on a black Stetson hat and pushed it back high on his head. Then he stood at the top of the stairs with his hands on his hips and looked around with the proprietary arrogance of a king.

  Harry recognized him immediately. Anton Shane was a minor produce-director, specializing in low-budget horror flicks. Harry didn’t particularly like him but the guy had given him his first, real movie break in a terrible remake of “The Creature from the Black Lagoon”, that was, of course, set in the Sinks.

  When Shane suddenly caught sight of him and waved, Harry smiled and automatically waved back and instantly regretted it. He groaned inwardly as Shane strode down the stairs and started across the street with a friendly smile stretched across his face. After all that had happened today, Harry was in no mood for exchanging gossipy pleasantries with Anton Shane.

  Shane favored riverboat gambler black suits with string ties and black cowboy boots polished to a mirror-sheen. With his coarse black hair sleeked back with oil and a perfectly trimmed pencil-thin mustache, he was aiming for the outlaw image of a nineteen-thirties, Hollywood-style villain, with a derringer up his sleeve, five aces in his hand, and a glass of whiskey at his elbow.

  It was said that “Shane” wasn’t even his real name, that he had taken some old movie gunfighter’s name to better fit his image. New Hollywood was all about image, he liked to say. You gotta have an image that sets you apart from the crowd, an image people will notice and remember. He never quite pulled it off…until now, Harry thought as he took off his sunglasses and studied Shane’s approach.

  This wasn’t just a harmless hustler with an image problem. Shane had changed, and it had nothing to do with image. He walked with a kind of careless, dangerous swagger, that telegraphed a don’t-give-a-shit attitude that was a little too real for the staid streets of New Hollywood.

  People were scurrying aside, giving him a wide berth. They can feel it too, Harry thought. This guy was like an atomic pile with all its control rods pulled. Just watching him move, you knew he’d reached critical mass and was capable of anything, and he didn’t mind letting you know it. In fact, he seemed to get off on letting you know it, but that didn’t make it any less real.

  Harry wondered what had happened. Shane had always been all show and no content, just a thin geek with soft features and bad skin, who had inherited a lot of money and wanted to play at making movies. He was still thin, but now he moved with the wiry grace of a mountain lion, and when he got closer, Harry noticed that his complexion had cleared and his too soft features had grown firmer. No, not firmer, Harry thought, but harder, crueler, more ruthless. Despite his bad-ass image, the old Shane wouldn’t have hurt a fly, but this new version…

  “Hi, Harry,” Shane said, still smiling and showing a lot of teeth. “It’s been a long time.” Even his voice had changed. The old, irritating, nasal whine had deepened and darkened and reminded Harry somehow of rusty hinges and smoked whiskey. When they shook hands, Harry felt a flash of contact, like blood splatter across a high speed crash that made him instinctively recoil and pull his hand away. What the hell was that? He wondered.

  Shane smiled knowingly. “You’ve changed, Harry,” he said. “You’re looking good. I heard you’re on the wagon now.”

  “You’ve changed too, Anton,” Harry said and didn’t mean for the better. The man was strung-out on something. There was an oily sheen of sweat on his face and even standing still his body seemed to be prowling restlessly in place, stalking each passerby, his eyes glittering with feverish hunger.

  “Yeah, I guess I have,” Shane said with a manic grin. “You might say I got some of that ‘old time religion’,” he jerked his thumb back at the black cube of the Wolf Temple and laughed. It was a deep, throaty growl of triumph with nothing funny about it.

  Harry decided he’d had enough weird for one day and flashed his best smile and looked at his watch as if he had an important engagement. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to be going,” he said. “It was good to see you again, Anton. Have a nice day.”

  “We’re not done, Harry,” Anton said and put a restraining hand on Harry’s arm. As he did so, his suit coat opened and Harry caught a glimpse of a neural whip clipped in a tight coil at his hip. Neural whips were another nasty import from the Sinks. They were a sadist’s wet-dream, capable of inducing unbearable pain at the flick of a switch.

  Harry stopped and looked pointedly at the hand on his arm and then at Shane. Harry was notorious for an uncontrollable, hair-trigger temper when he was drunk. Sober he was a pussy cat; most people didn’t know that and neither did Shane.

  Reluctantly, he let go of Harry’s arm, but his eyes smoldered with a barely contained rage that he smothered beneath an embarrassed grin. “Look, Harry, I’m sorry if I offended you. It’s just I get so excited over what’s happened to me that I sometimes forget that other people don’t understand, or maybe aren’t interested, in being remade.”

  Harry’s curiosity was pricked. Despite his better judgment he asked, “Remade? Isn’t that something that only Norma-genes do?”

  Shane gave a short, barking laugh. “Not anymore,” he said. “Look at me. I’m faster, stronger, healthier, and smarter than I’ve ever been in my life. He rolled his shoulders and stretched with feline grace and a soft purr of pleasure. “You can’t imagine how good it feels having the body of a healthy animal, strong enough to take whatever it wants, whenever and wherever it wants.”

  He leaned a little closer to Harry and whispered, “Let me tell you a little secret, Harry. God is an animal, the biggest, meanest, bad-ass animal in the universe. I know because I’ve run with him. Together we’ve slashed, torn and drunk the blood of prey in the holiest sacrament of the hunt. And when you take that blood sacrament, it changes you in ways you can’t imagine.”

  He looked past Harry into someplace only he could see. His eyes filled with infinite hunger. He licked his lips. “You can’t imagine how wonderful it is,” he whispered with breathless longing. “How clean and pure it is just being an animal. Life stripped to the bone. There’s no self-doubt or guilt, no moral complexities, no good or evil, no should I do this or that. Life is so simple, so pure. There are only the primal imperatives to hunt, kill, feed, and fuck…life stripped to the bone and nothing else matters.”

  His eyes refocused on Harry, but the hunger in them remained and the oily sheen of sweat seemed to thicken and darken his features.

  “You can’t imagine,” he repeated, in a voice filled with something akin to religious awe. He pulled away from Harry, shook his head as if to clear it, and shouted, “And that’s what I call Old Time Religion!” Then, he threw back his head and howled with laughter.

  Shane was as mad as a hatter and as dangerous as a rabid Rottweiler on steroids, and Harry wanted no part of him. Once again he tried to politely end this little séance. “This is all very interesting,” he said. “And I’m sure it’s done you a world of good but I really have to…”

  Once again, Shane stopped him with a hand on his arm. “It’s paradise, Harry,” Shane whispered. “I can take you there.”

  Harry reached down and grabbed Shane’s arm. The man looked at him with unconcealed contempt. Harry felt the corded muscles in Shane’s arm tighten momentarily and was surprised at the strength they telegraphed. Shane wasn’t kidding when he said he’d grown stronger. Then, he felt the other man relax his grip and Harry let go of his arm. “If you touch me again,” he said, “I’ll be forced to do something we’ll both regret.”

  Shane turned away, but Harry could see the angry flush that further darkened his features. The man was breathing hard and there was a soft dangerous growl riding every breath. “Time to go,” Harry said, and started to walk away.

  “Don’t you want to know what it’s like there?” Shane asked. “Your ex-wife knows.”

  Harry stopped and turned around slowly. “What about my ex-wife?” he said, his voice low and danger
ous.

  Shane’s lips twisted in a contemptuous smile. “That got your attention, didn’t it?”

  Harry felt a slow burn of anger ignite but tamped it down. “What about my ex-wife?” he repeated, as he slowly circled Shane, like a hunter circling a dangerous, unpredictable animal.

  Shane suddenly got cagey, glancing up and down the street at the pedestrians, who were stepping far out into the street to get around him.

  “Let me show you,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket and taking out what looked like an antique, silver snuff box. Shane flipped open the lid of the box, and Harry slid cautiously closer and glanced inside. A spikey, black crystal about the size of a large gum ball lay on a bed of purple velvet. The spikes sparkled like black diamonds in the dappled sunlight.

  Shane broke off one of the spikes and tried to hand it to Harry. Harry shook his head and stepped back. “What is it?” he asked, although he was pretty certain he knew already.

  “Black ice,” Shane whispered, his voice a reverent caress. “It’ll take you to where you want to go.”

  “And just where is that?” Harry asked impatiently. He was getting tired of Shane’s games.

  “The same place we all go,” Shane said dreamily as he stared down at the spiked ball of black crystal. “We could take it together, you and me,” he suggested and then shook his head. “No, it’s better to take it first in a big group. Then, we can all cross over together and hunt in a pack.

  “You have no idea. It’s so unbelievable. You’ve never felt so alive, so powerful, so pure, as when you hunt down your first kill and rip out its throat and feel its hot blood spray across your face.

  “And after the pack feeds, we fuck,” Shane’s voice fell into a soft crooning. “You’ve never fucked like that before. I guarantee it. It’s pure, unbridled, animal lust, with no restrictions, no moral qualms, no brake of conscience. Everything is allowed up to and including torture, rape, and murder of innocents.” He giggled and gave Harry a sly knowing look, a confidential wink and nudge that said, “We’re both men of the world. We know what the score is, don’t we?”