Limbus, Inc., Book III

by Jonathan Maberry

  Hiro said nothing. He couldn’t.

  “Now,” said Priest, “go and get me my book.”

  It took a lot for Hiro to continue. He stared into the mouth of the Orpheus Gate. Unlike the other one, this had a huge central diaphragm made of interlocking steel panels, like the shutter of a vast camera. Those panels had all been rolled back to reveal a massive glowing yellow light. It was like looking down the barrel of a long telescope to the surface of an alien sun.

  But it was not a sun.

  He looked around. The lab complex was spread out around and below him. All of the doors to all of the offices were open. Lights flickered on computer screens and along the surface of exotic machines. Every device in the lab was still functioning. Hiro was surrounded by the sound of computers and machinery laboring despite having no human guidance.

  The humans were no longer manning those machines.

  They were still in the lab, though.

  All of them.

  All that was left of them.

  Rags of red flesh lying in pools of blood.

  Pieces that had been discarded.

  Hiro looked back at the red sun.

  Which was not a sun.

  He knew that even though his mind did not want to accept it. He knew what it was. He knew.

  He did not start screaming until that massive, glowing orb at the other end of the collider blinked.

  -13-

  Sam Hunter

  The University of Pennsylvania Museum

  3260 South Street

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  I drove downtown as the sun toppled out of sight behind the skyline. There was a little food cart near the museum that sold pretty good hotdogs. I’m a stress eater, so I bought three of them, loaded with peppers, onions, and relish. Lots of spicy mustard, and three cans of Coke. My digestive system hates me, and I haven’t been on good speaking terms with my colon for years, but damn that stuff tasted pretty great. There’s a lot of bullshit talk about baseball stadium hotdogs and Coney Island hotdogs, but that’s just hype. Maybe it was true back in the sixties, but I wasn’t born yet, so as far as I’m concerned it’s ancient history. The best hotdogs come from those little stainless steel food carts owned by guys who don’t speak a word of English but know how to boil meat. Their peppers are hot to the point of being toxic and the sodas are so cold they hurt your tongue.

  I sat in my car and watched the street go dark. The food cart guy hitched up and drove off and the foot traffic dwindled. Tomorrow was Monday and it was a holiday. There wasn’t a lot of Sunday traffic and this wasn’t a residential part of town, so there weren’t many pedestrians. I could feel the street go quiet. The sights and smells and warmth of humans ceased to be the dominant energy and the older, colder energy of concrete, asphalt, glass, metal, and stone reclaimed the area. There were a few sentinel birds huddled close together on the edges of the big museum, but they were bored, weary pigeons and a few threadbare starlings.

  The side door of the museum opened and three docents and a girl who probably ran the souvenir shop came out, said some goodbyes, and went separate ways. Two toward the parking lot, one toward the subway, while the girl unchained a bike. I caught a glimpse of the security guard as he pulled the door shut from within.

  After another five minutes I started my car and circled the building, then parked back where I’d been. Then I got out, pulled on the backpack with the fake version of the Mysteries of the Worm in it, and walked around the building. The first circuit had been to watch for watchers, but when I went walking I used my nose more than my eyes. The little pack of cardboard scent cards were in my pocket and I’d sniffed each one before getting out of the car. The average Joe can remember smells well enough to tell the difference between a rose and a marigold or a steak and a roast chicken. The canine and lupine sense of smell is a couple of million times more acute. My Aunt Sophie liked to train me on it when I was a kid. She’d put a tiny drop of a scent in a little water and then freeze it. Sometimes she’d give me a whole bucket of ice cubes and I’d have to go through it to find the ones that had a scent, and then identify the scent. Or she’d give me a bucket where every cube had a different scent. It was a bitch but it was also fun. One cube might have a little dander from our dog, or some from the dog down the street. Another might have had a blade of grass dipped in it, or a micro drop of bacon grease. At first I was lousy at it, but it’s one of those things you grow into. Now it was old hat, and it’s one of those skills that always helped me when I was a cop in the Twin Cities, and it’s been really useful as a P.I. here in Philly. They make jokes about detectives sniffing for clues, but for me it’s truth in advertising.

  While I walked I took the air, so to speak. Scents are particulate, so just walking down the street my nose vacuumed up thousands of things. Sounds disgusting, and maybe it is, but it’s what it is. Next time you see a dog sniffing as it walks, bear in mind that Fido is learning everything about what happened on that street going all the way back to the last hard rain. People, animals, car exhausts, vermin, stuff on people’s shoes, trash blown by the wind. That’s the Internet for the nasally-inclined.

  I was three quarters of the way around the big museum before I caught a whiff of anything. Faint…and a little strange. I stopped and allowed the scent to fill me. It was a female scent. Very female. Vital in the way that women are, which is entirely different from male vitality. There’s a different chemistry and different physical potential in the blend of body oils, hormones, respiration, and pungencies. Which is not as creepy as it sounds. Not to me, anyway.

  The scent matched one of the cards in my pocket. I liked the smell, but at the same time it gave me the willies. Not just because this was almost certainly Violin, the woman Acantha said was incredibly dangerous. No. What made the skin along my spine tingle was that the scent wasn’t really human.

  And I had no idea what it was.

  Buried beneath her scent was a second and far less powerful scent. Male. Very human. Young. Harry Bolt? I could smell adrenaline and fear in large but equal quantities.

  The smells were recent. Ten minutes, maybe, which meant they probably entered the building while I was doing my circuit.

  I quickened my pace and was almost at a run by the time I reached the employee entrance. Acantha’s keys were clearly marked and within a few seconds I was inside, standing in a short hallway with a time clock and card rack on one side and a bunch of city ordinance and inspection certificates in cheap frames on the other. The scent was stronger in here because there was no fresh breeze to dissipate it.

  According to the timetable Acantha shared with me, Violin and Harry Bolt were always likely to get here first. In an ideal world they’d get the Manifesto and then haul ass out of here, maybe steal a car or go in disguise on a train or plane and head west. They’d gotten to the States aboard a series of commercial ships, the first of which took them to South America, then others that brought them incrementally to Baltimore. Not sure how they’d gotten here to Philly, but apparently stealing cars was in the skill sets of both Bolt and Violin. Fair enough. If they wanted to stay off the grid, though, then they might actually have to drive across country. Even with excellent fake IDs airports and train stations were risky. Between surveillance cameras, TSA, and fellow passengers who could be part of the bad guy network, you were also trapped. Trains and planes were boxes that weren’t under your control. A car can make it in less than a week using the right roads and with two people tag-teaming on the driving. The fact that I hadn’t seen a car outside didn’t mean there wasn’t one parked on a side street.

  So far the only scents from the pack of cards were the two I’d followed inside. Good. I’m not a pussy and I don’t mind a fight if the chips fall a certain way, but the two groups chasing this book, the Brotherhood of the Lock and the Closers, scared me a bit. I’ll admit it. My family are the benandanti. That’s not our surname; it’s what we are. The benandanti are clans of lycanthropes who can trace their lines back t
o Etruscan days. Most of us are firmly on the side of the angels, so to speak. There are a few rogues and lone wolves, but not many. Not that we all try to live up to some of our more celebrated ancestors. My grandmother and a couple of my aunts are more exceptions to the rule. They always liked poking their snouts into things. My dad wasn’t much of a troublemaker and he never did a thing for anyone unless it was helping them fill out their tax forms or coaching Little League. But in the past we had some real warriors. The problem is that we got serious pushback from people who should have been our allies. Our biggest enemy, strange as it seems, was the church. In their eyes we’re monsters and as they see it there’s only one kind of monster: the bad kind. A lot of my ancestors were hunted down, beheaded, hanged, burned, or tortured to death by groups like the Inquisition. That doesn’t inspire the warm fuzzies for hit squads like the Brotherhood, because they were tied to the Inquisition, in both history and approach.

  So, sure, I’m not a fan.

  Not a huge fan of any kind of religious fruitcake, actually. Doesn’t matter which version of God they pray to, or claim to work for. Militancy and religion make for dangerous fanatics. And assholes like that have hung a lot of benandanti pelts on their walls over the last two thousand years.

  As for the Closers…they were highly trained government agents with dangerous science fiction toys. I have teeth and claws. You know that old axiom about not taking a knife to a gunfight? Yeah, well that’s how I felt.

  Much as I hate to say it, I wished Joe Ledger was with me. Then I thought about what Acantha said. He was in a hospital in San Diego. He was dying.

  Shit.

  He was one of those guys who seemed to be painted with magic. The kind who might take some hits but would always be on his feet when the smoke cleared. Kind of scary to think that someone like him was off the field.

  It wasn’t very goddamn reassuring.

  With those gloomy thoughts filling my head, I moved through the building.

  Most of the place was dark except for small, dim security lights. I followed the scents and tried to not trip over my own feet. Wolves have decent night vision, but we’re not cats. We have great peripheral vision, though, so we notice a lot, but there’s this odd thing where we can’t always pick out details of the stuff we see, especially at a distance. We’re more movement sensitive. I sometimes wonder if our brains are so busy processing smells and, to a slightly lesser degree sounds, that the eyesight doesn’t get access to the same amount of mental computing. Not sure why, and no one in my family has ever outed themselves to a doctor for a study.

  So, I can’t be entirely blamed for tripping over the body in the hall and falling flat on my face.

  -14-

  Hiro Tsukino

  The Ritz-Cartlton, Dubai

  The Walk, Dubai

  United Arab Emirates

  Eighteen Months Ago

  The dreams were waiting for him every night. Dreams or maybe memories. He could never tell the difference and tried to escape from any certain knowledge. Booze helped. Pills, too. Sleeping pills and whatever else he could get. Rink had a few good connections and she kept him provided with whatever it took to help him through the night and to keep him functioning.

  Priest still needed him. More and more often now that their shared project was accelerating. Priest’s employer was putting a lot of pressure on him to obtain the last of the Unlearnable Truths.

  Hiro tried not to calculate the cost of obtaining those books. Not the money spent, but the human cost. The cost to him as a person.

  He knew without doubt that this was going to drive him insane. Maybe kill him, too, but that might be a relief.

  The dreams.

  Goddamn those dreams.

  If he didn’t take the right pills or drink enough to drop him down into the black, then when he closed his eyes he found himself back in that lab, staring down the barrel of the Orpheus Gate. Seeing the eye.

  Seeing the eye blink. Seeing it turn to look at him. Knowing that it was now aware of him.

  Sometimes all he could do was scream, and sometimes if the balance of pills was wrong, he screamed and screamed but could not scream himself awake.

  As for the book…sure, he’d found it.

  That part was easy because it was on a pedestal like the others had been. Waiting to be taken. Maybe wanting to be taken. After all, it, like all the others, contained that code and only when the code was deciphered and entered into an Orpheus Gate would the door swing all the way open.

  The thing that had looked at him had known that. Wanted that.

  It let him take the book.

  Even so, it had played with him. Things had come out of the tunnel. They tried to take him, touch him, own him. He’d grabbed the book and run and those things had followed.

  That escape was the reason Priest had hired him. Hiro had whirled and fled, running as fast as he could out of the lab and onto the walkway, dodging obstacles, vaulting corpses, clambering along trailing wires, swinging from cables to handrails, grabbing for his climbing rope, attaching it to the rings on his harness, all the time screeching for Boris and Priest to pull him up. Screaming, crying, begging. Even before the slack line went taut Hiro flung himself off of the platform and into the shaft.

  The tentacles very nearly caught him.

  Nearly.

  But the line jerked him upward as the winches drew him toward the ruined surface of the island.

  Hiro never stopped screaming. Not even after he was out of the shaft and unbuckled from his harness. He did not stop screaming until Boris raised his rifle and slammed the stock full-force into Hiro’s face.

  It was worse in the darkness of unconsciousness, though.

  Down there, trapped by concussion, he floated in a dark sea of nightmare. That sea was not empty and he was not alone. Slithery things rose from the depths and encircled him, igniting searing agony in his flesh and bones, filling his nostrils with the stink of rotting fish, and filling his mind with a chittering, endless cry from inhuman throats.

  “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

  That was what he’d heard down there. The cry had not come from the monster at the other end of the Gate.

  No.

  It had been a chorus raised by the dead. Every single corpse in the place had opened its mouth and shouted that cry.

  “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

  Sometimes, in the still of a long, bad night, Hiro realized that the voice crying out those words was his own.

  -15-

  Sam Hunter

  The University of Pennsylvania Museum

  3260 South Street

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  I’m not an idiot, so let’s clear that up right now.

  And, sure, I know I talk a lot about sense of smell and all that, but there was a bucket filled with water and bleach, and that’ll cancel out any animal’s sense of smell. Even my kind of animal.

  No, I didn’t smell the blood.

  Not until I did a face plant in it.

  So, it’s not entirely my fault.

  That said, I felt like the biggest freaking idiot in history. Sam Hunter, experienced investigator, benandanti, the guy Limbus had called to save the world.

  Fuck me.

  I tried to turn to catch the floor on my palms, but between surprise and the weight of the heavy book in my backpack, I was a microsecond too late and the cold marble banged my cheek. At least it wasn’t my jaw; otherwise I’d be spitting teeth. My species regenerates after most injuries, but—weirdly—missing teeth don’t always come back. Especially the older we get, and I was looking at middle age close enough to read the fine print.

  Sharp agony detonated in my head and I rolled sideways as if I could roll away from the pain. That’s when I realized two things. First, that I’d fallen into a fresh puddle of warm blood; and second, that the blood had all come from the security guard I’d seen letting the staff out.

  That snapped me into a different gear and I changed as I rose. Not to
full wolf, but to a useful half-and-half state that didn’t rip my clothes to shit. The shift turned the dial on my senses all the way to eleven, sharpening my night vision a bit and doubling my sense of smell. The bleach punched me pretty hard, but halfway to wolf I could smell the blood, too. Hard not to, I guess, when I was now covered in it. Shit.

  I quickly moved away from the corpse and crouched down, my back to a wall as I took in what the room and the moment had to tell me.

  The guard’s throat had been cut from ear to ear. A knife. The wound was too perfect for a claw. That was something. Was it Violin? As far as I could tell she and her companion were the only ones from Acantha’s set of scent cards who’d entered the building.

  If that was the case, though, it cast her in a different light. The guard was almost certainly an innocent. An unlucky bastard working a night shift whose very existence was inconvenient to someone else. That pissed me off. I may not be entirely human but I consider myself a humanist. When I found Violin and Harry Bolt I had some serious questions to ask them, and I had better like the answers or the guard wouldn’t be the only corpse on the premises.

  I removed my jacket and shirt, made sure there was nothing in the pockets, and dropped them. It had absorbed most of the blood. There was less on my pants and shoes. My undershirt was damp but not soaked. If there was time I’d come back to collect my stuff. I had a small-frame Glock on my belt if this turned into the O.K. Corral, but I seldom resort to gunplay. I have other weapons, and they’re built in.

  The hall was quiet but I strained to hear sounds from deeper inside the museum. Human ears wouldn’t have heard what I heard. A scuff of a shoe, the soft grunt of effort as someone did something in another room. The wheeze of someone who was getting out of breath.

  As I moved away from the corpse and the bucketful of dirty water and bleach, I could still smell the blood from the security guy. There were other smells, too. Human smells—sweat, skin, hair, breath, cologne, deodorant, socks. Everything has a unique scent.