Limbus, Inc., Book III

by Jonathan Maberry

  “What?” Jane said through gritted teeth.

  “Hark, the screams are over. He’s on his way. Sayonara.” Thom stepped backward into darkness.

  The stairs groaned beneath a ponderous weight. The intruder’s passage was attended by crashes of upended vases and the clink and clatter of framed photographs swept from the wall.

  A long shadow of awfulness flowed across the threshold, followed by the stink of blood and shit mingled with chlorine. The man of Jane’s dreams rushed through the doorway. Pieces of the women were papered to his massive torso like a collage. His clubfoot no longer appeared to afflict him.

  Jane squeezed the trigger. The shotgun lit the room with an orange flash and its report deafened her. She was still frantically working the slide when he clambered upright and sprang toward the bed.

  “What was the other thing I should’ve done?” A rhetorical question as her severed head smashed the window and splashed into the pool. She didn’t hear the resultant howl of victory and sorrow.

  Interlude: Doomsday Variations

  KRAKATOA (ALPHA CONTINUUM) RECORDING 7:

  …Reynolds pilots the skiff in heavy swells. Five men cling to the gunwales. Lt. Burton kneels in the bow, impeccable as an Emperor penguin.

  Krakatoa recedes in our silvery wake. Not many nuclear submarines left. Not many submarines, period. Fewer kids are born each year, which means fewer people are coming along to rebuild the technological gadgets lost defending the Republic’s meager territory. From what the intelligence community gathers, life isn’t a whole lot rosier anywhere. I think the scientists are on the money—things are going downhill in a hurry for us primates. Could be time for me to associate more intimately with another species. Trilobites may be on the comeback trail. There’s also the extraterrestrials to consider…

  Stars blink on. The great sulfuric fogbanks have diminished in the last decade to the point where we can chart some constellations with the naked eye. Belts of cold fairy dust sweep in all directions.

  Gerard crosses himself. Young guy, doesn’t talk much. Clutches his rifle like it’s a buoy. Him and Abram are the muscle. Flannigan, Enoch, and Rialto are corpsman, communications, and demolitions respectively. None of them are happy to be this close to a hole in space and none of them are happy to be touring what I figure is a modern village of the damned. Everybody’s pale and stinks of adrenaline.

  We land without incident, unload the equipment. Reynolds waves bye-bye and jets. We’ve sixteen hours to conduct the recon mission and rendezvous for extraction. If we aren’t on schedule, Pizarro will order a crater made of the environs. SOP, baby, SOP.

  I hang around to observe Enoch and Rialto assemble the robots. Robots and androids were the latest Big Thing right before the end. Lots of them ran on micro-batteries or solar power. The latter didn’t do so well during the nuclear winter. Now that the dust has settled, they’re back in style. Anything still running is back in style. The archeologists unearth lethal junk every day, yet it’s impossible to meet the demand.

  Lud and Caine are top of the line military hardware. The kind of hardware the folks at the Pentagon used to keep under their hats. The robots are comprised of millions of individual subatomic machines that when inert assume the mass of a golf ball. One flick of the switch causes them to telescope into a conglomeration of pods and stalks approximately three meters high. Their exoskeletons are of a plasti-rubber alloy, similar to our own battle suits, which are impervious to small arms fire and light explosives and change color to match terrain.

  Lud and Caine possess brains, I am told. Rialto and Enoch control them by voice from headsets. Magic, I say. Whatever the case, the robots are handy. They slice. They dice. They collect data and warn us if we’re wandering too close to a hot zone. Most of the hot spots have cooled and our suits are equipped with sensors and filters out the ying-yang. Never can be too careful, however.

  Rialto unleashes Caine, sends it skittering off the beach and over the ridgeline to the southwest. Lud trails. The men disappear after them.

  Burton gives the robots and their handlers a head start and then signals us to follow. Our squad emerges from a steep draw onto rocks above a natural amphitheater. At the bottom I pick out prefabricated houses, the lines of a larger building sunken into the limestone hillside. Swear to god it almost looks like a box store from the 2010s. Sodium lamps flicker under a pall of gray and green mist—beyond the mist are flashes of pure blue sky.

  Rialto and Gerard will return soon with the news. We’re operating under radio silence. My hackles are up. There is wrong and there is super-duper two-ply wrong. This is the latter…

  Chapter 6 (Thom)

  A deserted outlet mall squatted on the opposite side of the highway. Lights in the parking lot came on as the late afternoon gloom thickened. The sky cracked and released a torrent. God’s creatures great and small sought refuge wherever they could. Graffiti covered the inner arch of the overpass. Gang tags, guerilla art, Banksy-style pop culture critiques, and a sequence of numbers sprayed in red:

  1-800‐555-0606

  CALL HOME, TJ

  Thom lay propped against the ragged sidewall of a blown tire. She’d diminished to a skeleton in rags. Fever eagerly licked her bones, desirous of her sinews and marrow. Crows roosted upon a forgotten shopping cart and pecked in the moist earth near her unstrung bootlaces.

  Three weeks wandering the USA byways hadn’t ended well. She’d gotten shifts as a dishwasher and landed a gig as night clerk at a motel. Five nights ago an unreasoning fear sent her from behind the motel counter and flying into the night. South and south toward the coast, although she couldn’t have explained the compulsion any more than she understood what had caused her to flee it in the first place. Nightmares destroyed her sleep and inflicted waking sickness; fever and shakes. Her meager cash evaporated and she went hungry. She crawled beneath the overpass to sleep and possibly die.

  She hallucinated the suicide dive into the ocean led to a tour of the deeps. She piloted the Jaguar as a submarine, its headlights cutting through silty fog. She navigated red and green mountain reefs and jungles of kelp, descending into a trench. The car melted and she progressed into a cold darkness. The crushing pressure meant nothing. The cold and the dark meant nothing. Her pain and fear subsided, replaced by a smooth and vaguely contemptuous diffidence for such petty concerns.

  A ringing phone penetrated the depths and buoyed her to consciousness and the wracking chills and the odors of fermented garbage. Thom had spied the phone case mounted to a concrete slab and dismissed it as an emergency unit for 911. Usually such phones were installed on long bridges and remote terminals. The placement beneath the overpass seemed odd, but in her delirium she didn’t give it a second glance until it rang for five minutes straight.

  “Aren’t you going to answer? Might be important.” Plain Jane looked older since they’d last crossed paths. Left eye blacked, she wore a form-fitting dark blue jumpsuit that gave her the aura of an Olympic skier or a superhero.

  “Jane, you’re hurt.” Thom had to make an effort to form the words.

  “I’m T.J. Manson. Call me Manson.” Manson winked and extended her hand. “The shiner happened next week and it’s no concern of yours. Anyway, if Thom can’t come to the mountain…” She lifted Thom easily and supported her. “First order of business, answer the phone.” She half-carried Thom to the phone, opened the security box and put the receiver in her hand.

  “Hello, Thom,” a woman said. “I appreciate your taking a moment to speak with me.”

  Thom allowed Plain Jane to support her weight. The voice on the phone sounded familiar. “We’ve…we’ve spoken before.”

  “At length during your junior year in college. Wonderful conversations regarding your hopes and dreams.”

  “I wish I remembered. You helped me. Saved me.”

  The woman laughed pleasantly. “We assisted you in choosing the correct path. The credit for success belongs to you alone.” After a long silence, she said,
“Excellent that our talks bore fruit. You certainly left your mark on popular culture. Of greater importance, you awakened to your true potential. Partially, to be sure. There’s a final step, Thom. It’s okay to be afraid. Fear, indeed terror, is your birthright.”

  Thom held on tight to consciousness. The smell of the ocean grew powerful. Twilight pulsed brighter then darker. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “There’s only one thing to do,” the woman on the phone said. “Be yourself. Goodbye, Thom. Everyone here at Limbus extends their best.”

  Manson lifted Thom in her arms and walked swiftly uphill and onto the overpass. There were no headlights, only a bruising rain and empty lanes that vanished into shadow. Roaring began in the distance. Water crossed the plain and covered everything except for their strip of road. Points of manmade light extinguished. Soon nothing of civilization remained beyond the ditches. Water and steam, rising. The sky tore like a piece of construction paper and the stars peeled aside.

  Thom laid her head against Manson’s shoulder. The voice she’d heard on the other end of the line had been her own.

  Ahead, a metal tower shot up from the horizon like some god’s pointillism—the width and height of a skyscraper, smooth and featureless. It siphoned the faded sunset. Light glowed upon the metal and turned it gold and red and black.

  Manson jogged. Her boots splashed.

  *

  Later, in the dim, sulfurous light of a metal cavern, Manson introduced Thom to her prisoner. The prisoner crouched next to a frigid lagoon. He was chained at the ankle. Manson kicked his feet until he toppled. She put her boot on his neck. He struggled and his considerable muscles bulged to no avail.

  Manson said, “This man has a thousand names. He is your son and a corruption.”

  Thom cried silently. The tears burned. “I don’t know him.”

  “Yes, yes, you do. Look harder. Look into his mean little eyes. You know this fucker.”

  “No.” The tears burned. Smoke hissed from her blouse. “Wait. Do I?”

  Manson nodded. “It’s not even a memory. It’s part of your DNA.”

  Despite her sickness and confusion, that felt right. She regarded the stranger and a sour antipathy oozed from a recess of her soul. She knew him, hated him. His burgeoning fear-stink pleased her.

  Manson bent and unlocked the prisoner’s ankle shackle.

  The man reacted with alacrity. He slipped sideways into the lagoon. His form shifted to that of something large and aquatic and vanished. Thom screamed in rage and lunged toward the water. Redness overwhelmed her senses.

  “I apologize,” Manson said as she jabbed Thom’s neck with a needle and pumped in a frightening dose of elephant tranquilizer. She lowered the woman to the ground and stroked her cheek. “We’ll see him again. I promise.”

  “That does it,” Thom said as her eyes rolled back. “You’ll be sorry. Every one of you.” She snored.

  “Promise,” Manson said.

  Interlude: Doomsday Variations

  NARRATORS UNK (ECHO CONTINUUM) RECORDING 9:

  “My earliest memory is of the Scripps-henge—sunset at the end of the pier and Dad carrying me through the pylons into the bloody eye of Jupiter. We lived in San Diego for a year. I remember the devil sun. San Diego is the land of fabulous tanned tits. A shame my travels haven’t taken me back now that I’m old enough to do something about them…”

  “Who needs the revelation of cosmic horror? I just saw a video of people on a Canadian highway reaching out the windows of their cars to feed grizzly bears…”

  “A nightmare taught me to smudge out my features. Mom, Dad, big sis, and baby bro surrounded me as I lay helpless in the hospital bed. One by one, starting with Dad, they rubbed their faces into voids. When I woke, choking back a scream, it was because I’d erased my own mouth. It’s weird, it’s frightful and like my old pulp hero, The Shadow, it’s a trick of hypnotic suggestion, the power to cloud the minds of men. The alternative is worse. The blurry geography of our limited perceptions creates a comforting illusion of finite space…”

  “I have hunted and slaughtered seventy-four people (twenty-two men, fifty women, and two unknown). Many of these are attributed to animal attacks. This is technically correct. The yellow-eyed wolf, the eighteen-foot tiger shark, the razorback…their victims heard them whisper, heard them laugh, at the savage end. I am about to be taken down by a bumbling private detective with powdered sugar on his tie. Oaf or not, he’s got a set of pistols (pearl-handled six shooters for the love of Christ) and the drop. Silver lining? This is the breakout moment. I’ll go international. It is so exciting…”

  END RECORDING

  Chapter 7 (Creely & Manson Together)

  Creely punched the blonde in the jaw. The kind of shot he’d perfected ages before the Romans or Greeks made it an art; the kind of blow that would reliably put a three-hundred-pound defensive tackle to sleep. When she smirked he panicked, crossed with a right and kicked backward and put furniture between them. Blood oozed from the hole she’d torn in his neck. He tried not to think of the dozens of deaths he’d met at the hands of enemy tribesmen.

  They stood, both nude, he dripping red, she rubbing her chin, and regarded one another.

  She yawned and took a step forward and stretched her arms in a distracting manner. “I’m waiting for your loyal manservant to burst in with a sawed-off. Spoil my fun.”

  “Any second now. Jeeves is a crack shot.”

  “Do tell.”

  “I’d advise jumping out the window.”

  “Get while the getting is good, is what you mean?”

  “That’s my sincere advice.”

  “Not a chance. You’re less boring than most of the rich scumbags I’ve balled. Think I’ll stick around and see where the evening goes.”

  “Thanks. I took classes, practiced in front of a mirror, et cetera.” He’d clamped his hand against the wound to staunch the bleeding. He risked taking it away. The blood had begun to coagulate. His body regenerated swiftly, always had, especially when his adrenaline started cooking. “This might be a trifle indelicate. Your name escapes me.”

  “Seriously, dude? After ruining your pool table with our…You can’t even remember my name?”

  “Sorry. It was really special.”

  “Manson. T.J. Manson. Bet you don’t forget again.”

  “No wager.” Creely slid his left foot back and to the left. Unfortunately, despite his bravado to the contrary, the servants had gone home after cleanup duties. That meant he might be fucked in more ways than the obvious. Weapons hung as museum ornaments—spears, sabers, knives, and rifles behind glass, revolvers tucked inside cabinets. The problem lay in getting his hands on one. If he could only make a run for his closet, the tables would turn with a vengeance. She looked fast. Fast and deadly and opportunistic. The second he turned to flee, she’d pounce; a move he’d executed on hapless prey on innumerable occasions.

  Manson said, “Gotta say—that massacre at the house party last year? Uncool. I figured you were smarter. You stay on a program. Usually it’s the isolated bitch running through the woods, or a juicy hitchhiker, or a vagrant nobody will miss. A houseful of dumb middleclass broads? You must lead a charmed life.”

  “I have deep pockets, which enhances my appeal,” he said.

  “Getting cocky in your dotage.”

  “Bored.”

  “Didn’t you recognize your great love? Or is that why you made hash of Jane and her friends?”

  Creely longed to rend, to maim. Images shuttered through his mind—he saw himself in tall grass, pursuing deer and antelopes and men. He composed himself, took a breath, and affected a reasonable demeanor. “For the record, Jane isn’t my great love.”

  “Then why slaughter the poor lady?”

  “I slaughter lots of people.”

  “This feels personal. History?”

  “Yes.”

  “Or should I ask Renzo the Magnificent?”

  “Sure, ask Renzo. Or Don
Juan, or Faust. Ask Mephistopheles.”

  “I’d love it if one of you would level.”

  “Whatever her psychological condition, Jane, as you refer to her, shares my predilections. You’d know. I’ve got your scent. Different. Strange. You’re her. Her twin, her clone without…”

  “Without her predilections?”

  “I intended to say potential. How can this be?”

  “We contain multitudes.”

  “Jane is worse. She’s the real threat. She’s the one you should be trying to kill.”

  “I’m not here to kill you.”

  “Glad to hear it, sweetheart. I will kill you.”

  He grabbed a wingback chair and drove its legs at her midsection. She caught the chair and they contended for several moments, then she ripped it from his grasp and flung it across the room and moved in, fingers crooked and digging for his eyes. He kicked her in the thigh and a welt bloomed. She pressed and he feinted a jab to her nose and kicked her in the leg again. She smiled and slapped the next jab aside and blocked the follow-up kick with the point of her elbow against his shin. The shock and pain of fractured bone fogged his brain. He couldn’t put much weight on his left leg, so he lifted another chair and swung it and when she raised her hands to pluck it from the air, he let go and bolted through the door.

  “Goddamn it, come back here,” Manson said.

  Creely made it halfway along the corridor to the grand staircase. His leg buckled and he sprawled beneath the impassive gaze of the stuffed and mounted head of a bison he’d bagged on a domestic safari. Manson drove a knee into his spine and chopped the edge of her hand across his neck.

  *

  He awakened inside a holographic dream of Wyoming, 1997.

  The sky lay flat and close. Sun and moon and faint stars hung in balance.

  Wind shivered the pale grass of the plains and drumlin slopes. He crouched so that blades tickled his mouth and concealed him from the bison herd as it grazed. The end of the Twentieth Century or the end of the Paleolithic, there was no visible distinction in this place.

  Creely gripped a spear with an obsidian head. His companions reposed at the lodge, drinking, gambling, fat with a rich meal and pride at their accomplishments, their sniper accuracy. Creely had come to these hills with the hunters because they were wealthy and influential. Two managed satellite companies that belonged to the Creely franchise; two others were elite investors; another held congressional office in New York State.