Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

  He stepped into his brand-new, heavy-duty hiking boots with the price tag still attached and shouldered the pack without even looking inside. Just then, his wrist phone beeped. He glanced at the display. A heavily encrypted number…Jericho. They’d agreed on this in case of an emergency. He tapped in the key and the display cleared and Jericho’s face appeared. “I’m on my way,” Roger lied.

  “Change of plans,” Jericho said. “My place,” and cut off.

  They were supposed to meet at Chueh’s. The old Tong Godfather was going to arrange for them to slip out of the city undetected. Roger wondered what had gone wrong and headed for the underground garage. On the way he stopped off in his private armory and picked up a pulse rifle and an automatic fléchette mini-gun. He figured if things were already going wrong, he might need all the help he could get.

  After the fiasco at Eternal Life yesterday, the wolves had been totally pissed off at him. They blamed him for Harry’s escape. They told him to kiss off any hope of seeing Susan again. They were taking her back to Las Vegas with them. Maybe, if she was lucky, they would let her be a pleasure slave in one of their temples.

  When he learned that Diana was going to attempt to get into Las Vegas to rescue her sister, it was like an answer to his prayers…except Diana wasn’t answering prayers. She took one look at his out-of-shape, overweight body and bloodshot eyes and said she didn’t want him, didn’t need him, and wouldn’t take him. He begged, bribed, threatened, and demanded.

  She said he was in no shape to follow her where she was going. At best he would slow her down, at worst he would get her killed. He told her she could leave him anytime he couldn’t keep up. She said it might not only be a matter of keeping up. Where she was going, he might not be able to follow. It was as simple as that, whatever that meant.

  In the end, Jericho interceded on his behalf, pointing out that two had a better chance than one and that if Harry didn’t turn up, Roger was the only other candidate they had. Candidate for what was never explained, and he really didn’t care as long as it got him to Las Vegas.

  Then Jericho surprised him by saying that he, Roger, was someone Diana could count on to guard her back, and besides, he had a fleet of some of the fastest, best-armed grav-cars in the Empire. At least he wasn’t lying about the last part, Roger thought, as he walked down the row of grav-cars in the garage. He even had a couple of vintage ground cars with old internal combustion engines that had been lovingly restored.

  He stopped before a small red roadster. It was the fastest, most maneuverable, and for its size the best armed grav-car he owned. It was spider-spin armored against most impact weapons and, like all his cars, had the finest military software upgrades money could buy. This one, though, had a few extras that might have raised eyebrows even in the Imperial Security Service.

  The Tongs and the imperial police patrolled the seas around New Hollywood and kept them relatively free from pirates, Slavers, Seraphim, and other scum, but once you went beyond the boundaries of their protection, you were on your own. Before Roger met Susan, he frequently used the little roadster for illicit trips into the roadhouse fleshpots and gambling casinos in the criminal no man’s land bordering the Sinks.

  He could probably find most of what he was looking for in the brothels, casinos, and pleasure gardens of the District, but they couldn’t give him what he really wanted. What he really wanted was the dangerous, forbidden thrill of once more walking on the wild side of his past, outside the laws and circumscribed boundaries of his life in New Hollywood. Out there, on the boundaries of the Sinks, anything could happen and usually did. He’d killed men out there, men who were trying to kill him for his flash car and pig skin wallet.

  Out there, he could allow himself to be himself, to relive his hard scrabble life on the wild side before he came to New Hollywood. He had grown up dirt poor in one of the old Seraphim eastern provinces, back up in the hills, bordering the Quarantine. It was a hard, violent, precarious existence. He had killed his first man before he was twelve. It was a mutie, trying to rape his mother. By the time he was fourteen, he was on his own, his mother and father dead, their homestead burned to the ground. He’d tracked down the Jacker gang that did it and killed three more men.

  After that, he fled westward with a price on his head and bounty hunters on his heels. He left their bones on his back-trail until, at last, no one followed him anymore, and he came to New Hollywood. He was sixteen years old, hard and feral and determined to claw out a place for himself at the top of all the wealth and glitter at the center of the Empire.

  And when I finally got it, it was never enough, he thought. There was always a gnawing emptiness that couldn’t be filled, that drove him back to the wild side roadhouses on the borders of the Sinks with their promise of bare knuckle violence and life on the edge.

  Then he fell in love with Susan, another man’s woman, and it changed his life. He rubbed his hand lovingly across the glossy, smooth front fender of the roadster. The little car was fast and deadly and had gotten him out of more than a few dangerous scrapes but since Susan, it had mostly gathered dust.

  He climbed in and started it up. The hum of the oversize grav-coils was deep and even. He applied lift and slid smoothly out of the garage and out onto the lift pad. Before taking off, he reprogrammed the finish from bright red to automatic camouflage that would blend into any background.

  Five miles from Jericho’s island compound, he picked up a warning signal that he was entering restricted, private airspace. He identified himself and continued toward the island that was nothing but a long, overgrown ridge sticking out of the sea. Jericho’s house was built into the side of the ridge in a classic twentieth century construction of wood and glass that seemed a natural part of the landscape.

  The old man was waiting for him on the landing pad set in the middle of a large pond at the base of the ridge. A waterfall poured from the top of the ridge, past one of the house’s large picture windows, and into the pond. Roger followed Jericho across an arched wooden bridge, onto a vine covered wooden deck and entered the house.

  Roger knew that the house was only the tip of the iceberg and that buried beneath the ridge was one of the largest, best-equipped research facilities in the world. Very few people knew about it. Jericho kept a low profile and had sworn Roger to secrecy before he showed him. Roger always played his part perfectly, treating Jericho in public with the kind of offhand contempt that infuriated Harry. He wondered if Harry knew Jericho’s secret. He doubted it. Even friends would be kept on a need to know basis as far as Jericho was concerned, and Harry definitely didn’t need to know in Roger’s opinion.

  Jericho led him down a long corridor edged with a floor-to-ceiling, diamond glass window that looked out on the pond. They went up a spiral staircase of chrome and unfinished redwood planks and entered a spacious living room with another floor-to-ceiling diamond glass window. This one gave a magnificent view from the top of the ridge and out across the sea.

  The room was furnished in mid-twentieth century American style; right down to one of only three Jackson Pollack’s to survive the Crash. The painting hung above a black, low slung, leather sofa that faced the window. A coffee table of unfinished driftwood planks, resting on chrome mountings, stood before the sofa. There was a coffee service on the table and to one side Diana’s open electronic notebook.

  Roger noted its battered appearance. It looks like it’s seen better days, he thought…lots of better days. It must have been over twenty years old. He wondered, in passing, what use she had for an antique like that.

  He turned and looked at her. She stood with her back to him, staring out the window, a cup of coffee in her hand. She wore a pair of scuffed hiking boots, faded jeans, and a washed out, gray flannel shirt. The butt of what looked like an ancient Colt .45 Peacemaker stuck out of a worn leather holster strapped low on her hip. The walnut pistol grips were black with age. She turned. The flannel shirt was open at the throat, and Roger noticed that she was wearing an
insulated spider-spin body stocking underneath. He felt a little like a clothing store dummy in his factory pressed cords and the price tag still dangling from his new boots.

  “You’re late,” she said, not criticizing but simply stating the fact. Then she seemed to see him for the first time. “You look terrible,” she said.

  “That’s better than I feel,” he said. He wondered what would happen to her cool composure if he told her that the reason he was late and looked so terrible was that he had gotten blind, stinking drunk last night and if it was up to him, he’d rather stay that way the rest of his life. Probably not a good idea, he decided.

  “What did you do to your hand?” she asked.

  “Accident,” he said as he took a seat on the couch. Diana turned back and stared out the window. Jericho offered him coffee and then told him that Harry had gone missing in the Sinks. “He went there to meet Susan,” he said.

  “Son of a bitch!” Roger ran his fingers through his sparse ginger hair. “Why the hell did he have to do that?”

  “From what I’ve been able to piece together,” Jericho said, “I think he thought she was in some kind of trouble and asked for his help.”

  Roger thought of what the wolves had done to Susan the other night, how she must have looked to Harry, and how Harry had reacted to him. “He must have thought I beat her up,” he said.

  “Or maybe she told him you did,” Jericho suggested.

  “You didn’t tell him?”

  “That the wolves had taken her?” Jericho shook his head. “No, he didn’t stick around long enough to hear.”

  “So the wolves got him too,” Roger said.

  “We don’t know,” Jericho said cautiously. “Chueh went down into the Sinks with a division of Tong soldiers to get him out and got into a fire-fight with Seraphim militias. The last I heard, it’s turned into an all-out war down there. Apparently, the Seraphim have some kind of new weapon that can bring down grav-cars by stopping their engines. It sounds like the same thing the Norma-genes used to bring down that imperial search and rescue party in the Quarantine last year. According to Chueh’s last report, his Tongs were taking a beating and were in retreat.

  “We don’t have much time,” Jericho said, pacing restlessly back and forth. With his long thin legs, hunched shoulders, and undertaker suit, he reminded Roger of a big, black stork. “All hell’s broken out in the city. It looks like an attempted coup. There’s a lot of fighting around the Imperial Palace and even the Eternal Life building.”

  Roger nodded. “Yeah, there would be,” he said and thought of all the wolf-possessed whom he had allowed to infiltrate the building in the last months. Even the coup didn’t surprise him. He had met enough rich and powerful wolf-possessed to suspect something like this might happen.

  “Chueh saw it coming,” Jericho said. “Before he left the city last night, he sealed off all the entrances to the Silver Slipper and his garden. No one gets in or out. Then he dropped us off here, before heading into the Sinks. He left a squad of Valkyrie to guard the place…

  “Valkyrie!” Roger said in surprise. “Since when are the Tongs in bed with the Church of the Goddess?”

  Jericho shrugged. “War makes strange bedfellows,” he said. “Anyway, the Church pulled their Valkyrie back when fighting broke out in the city.”

  “Wait a second,” Roger said. “Has anybody bothered to check the monitor on Harry’s ka?”

  “Chueh had that covered,” Jericho said. “He was hacked into Eternal life, tracking Harry through his ka. Just before the balloon went up in the city, the monitor on his ka went dead. He never resurrected.”

  “Dead,” Roger repeated dully and closed his eyes. “Worse than dead. I’ve seen it happen more than once at Eternal Life. It means the wolves ate him! Susan told me they like to do that sometimes instead of taking possession. It’s a kind of Masters of the Universe delicacy.”

  He shook his head in despair. “It’s something you don’t come back from. No rebirth in the light of the Goddess.” He was surprised at how hard this hit him. “Harry and I were never close, but God damn it! No one deserves to die with their ka ripped into nothingness to feed a wolf!”

  Jericho shot a concerned glance at Diana, standing ramrod straight with her back to them, staring out the window. “It doesn’t necessarily have to mean that,” he said without conviction.

  “Yeah, right!” Roger spat and finished off his coffee and slammed the cup down hard enough to crack the delicate, pre-Crash, antique, bone china.

  Jericho winced at the sight of the cracked coffee cup and then sighed resignedly. “The only positive thing to come out of all this is that no one seems to care about you two anymore. You should be able to get out of here without too much trouble.”

  “What about you, Mr. Morley?” Diana said with her back to him, still staring out the window. “Do you still have a monitor on your ka?”

  “I went in and wiped the coding and removed the monitor yesterday like Jericho suggested,” Roger said. “No one can trace me now.”

  “And you can die for real now,” she said as if she was commenting on the weather.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Roger said uncomfortably. “What about you?”

  “Me?” Diana said and turned and looked at him, her face cool and composed. “I’ve never had a monitor on my ka,” she said and as she brushed back a stray lock of her jet, black hair, Roger noticed for the first time the ring on her finger, the black onyx ring of a Jaganmatri Valkyrie. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he said.

  “In all probability,” Diana said and placed her cup on the coffee table. She picked up her notebook and snapped it shut. “It’s time to go,” she said decisively as if she was closing a business meeting. “Thank you for your hospitality, Doctor Jericho and for that information about the Nevada Quarantine.” She shook his hand and turned towards the door. “I left my gear downstairs,” she said over her shoulder to Roger as she walked out. “Are you coming?”

  Roger eyed Jericho. “That is one cold, Valkyrie bitch,” he said and irritably ripped the price tag off his new boots and threw it on the table beside her coffee cup. Then he noticed the cup was still full. She hadn’t touched a drop.

  Jericho noticed too. “Looks can be deceiving,” he said.

  On the way out, they picked up Diana’s gear in the downstairs hall. Roger noticed that her pack was surprisingly compact with an old, brown, leather jacket folded on top. He also noticed the sawed-off shotgun in a battered leather shoulder scabbard leaning against the pack. The walnut butt had been cut down and sculpted into a stubby pistol grip that was scratched and worn and as black with age as the grips on the forty-five.

  Before they took off, Jericho suggested they cut due east, keeping well away from the troubles in the Sinks before turning north. Roger thought this was a good idea. They might lose an hour or two in the beginning but they would make it up as soon as they got into the open waters of the Trench that ran all the way up to the Sacramento Palisades.

  Then in a surprising sign of affection, Jericho leaned over and kissed Diana goodbye and wished her luck.

  By late afternoon, they had left the Rift Archipelago behind and Roger had come to the conclusion that Diana was lousy company. Her mind seemed to be elsewhere and all his attempts at conversation petered out into brooding silence. He glanced over at her pale profile staring out the window and thought of the coffee untouched in her cup. For some reason, he thought of Harry.

  “Here are the coordinates for where we’re going,” she said, breaking the silence for the first time in over an hour.

  He’d asked for them before they left, but she told him to simply steer due north towards the Sacramento Palisades and the Northern Reaches. They were still over a hundred miles south of the Palisades and when he fed the new coordinates into the navigator he saw that where they were going was nowhere near them. In fact, they were going nowhere near the Northern Reaches or the Eastern Oregon Quarantine that he had been led to believe was the
ir destination.

  “Do you mind telling me what’s going on?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she answered without looking at him.

  “Look, let’s cut the horse shit!” he said. “We’re in this together, remember? Back at Chueh’s I got the impression we’d be heading for the Eastern Oregon Quarantine and a back door into Las Vegas. According to these coordinates, we’re going to cut due east in a little while and then continue on that heading right up into someplace in the High Sierras.”

  “That’s correct,” she said.

  “But that’s in the middle of nowhere!”

  She nodded. “That’s just where we’re going, the middle of nowhere.”

  45

  Creatures from the Black Lagoon

  He slammed back into his body like a Looney Tunes Wiley Coyote, riding a rocket sled into the face of a cliff. But old Wiley, spread-eagled and splattered against a cliff, couldn’t possibly feel as bad as Harry, mashed back into a body screaming with pain and drowning in toxic shock.

  On top of that, someone just tried to electrocute him. That’s what cut his umbilical, he realized. He should be dead! Why wasn’t he dead, he wondered, just before someone drove a rusty spike through his heart! Adrenaline rush kicked it up from zero to one hundred beats in two seconds flat. It jackhammered against his chest cavity with enough force to shake his whole body. What the hell was going on?

  Now someone strapped the wrong side of a pincushion around his underarm and hundreds of small needles dug in. Who were these clowns? Were they trying to kill him all over again? He fought against the double trauma of being violently pulled back from the dead into his body and the rush of adrenaline shocking through his system.

  He opened his mouth in a silent scream of protest, and they shoved a soft plastic tube down his throat and held his nostrils closed. He started choking on the hose as pure oxygen re-inflated his collapsed, burnt lungs. The initial pain was excruciating, and he struggled to spit out the tube as his body flopped around, raising thick clouds of silt from the seabed.