The voice came again, this time far more demanding and not as easily ignored.
“Wake up, Vincent.” Without his willing it, his eyes ripped open, granting him a close-up view of plain black tile covered in pus and blood. He jerked away from the contact. Yelling in surprise and disgust, he threw himself backward and skidded on his ass across the floor.
Parker remembered most of what had happened as he took in the surroundings. He was still in the morgue, but he was the only one. The mess he and Brokov had walked in on was still in the corner, though Drakanis, Woods, and the thing that had been trying to strangle them were all missing. So was Taeda, for that matter.
Bitch shot me. He tried to count how many times he’d gone out and had a gun waved in his face and couldn’t; all he could remember was that never before had he actually been shot. He’d always claimed it was due to his lucky vest.
“Bastards won’t shoot me because they know it won’t do any good,” he had told Drakanis on more than one occasion. Of course, now a bastard had—a cop, no less.
What the fuck did she do that for? Of course he knew. It wasn’t hard to make the leap. Taeda and Manderly had been assigned guard duty this morning, and he doubted that had been an accident. If there was one mole in the department, why not two or three? Hell, who knew how many of them there were. For all he knew, the goddamn janitor had poisoned the whole fucking well.
“Stop it, Vincent.” The voice came from lower down this time, right beside him like it was someone speaking in his ear. He jumped, jerking his neck to the side and wincing at the sudden pain that bloomed in his gut. While his lucky vest might well have stopped the bullet, there’s a certain amount of force behind such objects and Kevlar doesn’t do a whole lot about that. He imagined he was probably black and blue from his dick to his neck, and that was if he was lucky. No wonder he’d been out of it.
When he turned to look, there was no one there. He reached for his gun and then realized it was still on the floor next to where he had been. He inched forward, glancing all about, to snatch it from the floor. He checked the clip; the dull gleam of metal in the topmost casing told him what he needed to know.
Fuckers left me for dead. Must have been in a hurry. That was pretty much without doubt. The only question here was who had left him for dead. He doubted that it had been Drakanis and Woods. Even if Damien was a bit of an asshole, Mikey wouldn’t let him leave Parker behind, especially not if they had taken Brokov, and since she wasn’t present, he had to assume they had. That meant Taeda and whoever was helping her—Manderly almost certainly, but who knew how many others—had probably been the winners. Why none of them had felt the need to put one in the back of his head to make sure was a mystery.
“Vincent. This thinking isn’t getting you any closer.” The voice sounded almost bored by now, as he searched the room again, flattening himself against the south wall, next to the back door.
“Who the fuck are you? Where the fuck are you?”
He heard a sigh and felt cold air brush across his face, tickling his lips and nose. “You won’t be able to see me, Vincent. But you can listen, and I advise you do it well.”
“That doesn’t answer question number one.”
“No. But there is no answer to question number one, as you put it. I am many things and people, none of them important. What matters to you is that your friends are missing, may already be dead—and I can guarantee that one of them will be by this time tomorrow—and you must choose whether you will follow them or allow the Beast to rise.”
He tried to tell if the voice was anything familiar and couldn’t; to him, it didn’t sound like a single voice but like dozens layered on top of one another. Every one of them sounded like someone he knew, just off-key ever so slightly. He heard Morrigan in the voice, and Elaine and Mike and more, some of them only bringing on a bit of déjà vu, others hitting him with the full force of memory, but all of them familiar.
“What the fuck are you talking about, one will be dead tomorrow? What the fuck are you?”
The answer came with the force of a slap, driving him to his knees and making him bleat in pain. He felt foolish for daring to have questioned the voice. The power behind it was incredible, dripping off of every word and undeniable.
“I am what I am! Now you will listen, Vincent, and you will listen very well. The one you call Michael Drakanis will be the one to choose, but he will choose wrong if you are not there to support him. The one you call Sheila Brokov will be slain by the agents of the Beast if you are not there to help her. The one you know as Damien Woods is damned, regardless of your actions. These are the cards, and such is the fate I have saved you for. Choose, and be done with it.”
The voice and the terms it used made Parker distinctly uncomfortable, especially the answer to his question, the one that had driven him back and made him wonder why he’d bothered to ask. He had never been a part of any particular faith, and his approach to churchgoing had always been scattershot, but they had a biblical feel to them. He didn’t think he was dealing with God—not the Big Guy that Muslims and Christians and Jews were all the time killing each other over—but whatever it was seemed to be close enough for government work. He wondered if this was what had come to Woods and forced him to choose and decided the answer was probably yes.
“These thoughts accomplish nothing and waste time, Vincent.” The voice sounded tired and impatient, but the fury that had come off of it a moment ago seemed to have dissipated. “If you would save any of them, choose now or return to the dark.”
The phrase sent a chill down his spine, and he realized he hadn’t really looked down at himself to see just how well that bullet had been stopped. Sure, he was wearing his lucky vest, but he was no longer certain it was rated to stop a bullet to the gut at point-blank range, especially not when it had been left open. One hand reached down and rubbed at his stomach. The dent he found there didn’t encourage him much. He found fear—real fear, for once—lurking in his mind and decided he didn’t want to explore any further. Better to chalk it up to coincidence. Much better.
“Fine. Whatever you want, as long as it means I get to kick the shit out of that traitorous bitch and make sure Mikey doesn’t dig himself an early grave.”
As the words left his mouth, Parker felt the crazy urge to renege, to take it back, but it was already too late; he could feel some new awareness blossoming in him, some sense of things beyond what normal people saw and heard and felt. He heard voices echoing in his head, speaking in a hundred languages and whispering in a thousand tongues. Parker clapped his hands to the sides of his head, screaming and begging for it to stop, please stop.
Mercifully, it did. The voice seemed to have departed as well, leaving him alone in his head, but there was a new sense of urgency beating within him, trying to pull him like a magnet. He dragged himself to his feet and looked around. What he saw made him wonder why Woods—or Drakanis for that matter—wasn’t a raving psychopath by now, if this was anything like what their supposed “gifts” gave them.
The morgue was no longer a room of chrome and crimson, blood and steel. Everything was pitch-black, squirming with threads of green, writhing like maggots on rancid meat. The only thing that looked sane and normal in the room was the back door. The door to the front was glowing that same rotten green. The cool blue steel of the back door had a calming effect. The pull in his guts said to go that way, and he didn’t see any particular reason to deny it, so he stepped out.
He didn’t pay any attention to the blood that was pooled on the floor where he’d been lying; it was fresh and wet.
* * *
Two hours later, he found himself standing in the empty streets looking up at the windows of the Hotel Silverado, feeling a twisting wire of apprehension in his guts and an ice pick of unreality driving into his brain. He had wandered for a short time after making his devil’s bargain—if tha
t was what it was—while his new perceptions tried their best to drive him stark raving mad or at least as close to the corner as they could.
He had discovered that he didn’t see things in any way resembling what he had once upon a time when the world was normal and didn’t contain such things as the devil within the talu`shar or the animated corpses of other people’s loved ones. Everything had a new tone, a new coat of paint, and none of it appeared to be pleasant.
People were surrounded by colors, and when they spoke, he could see their words hovering in the air; from the color and the way the words looked, he was fairly sure he knew what they were thinking and if they were telling the truth. He had seen a bum over on Mill Street, covered in a shroud of black and crimson, and knew even before the man spoke that he was dying. When the bum asked for a quarter, claiming he had a bus to catch and tickets were almost sold out, the shape they made in the air combined with an extra harmonic note within to tell Parker the man intended to find the nearest 7-Eleven and buy a quart of antifreeze. He had told the bum to fuck off.
He had seen and heard others, but none of them quite as stunning as the display around the bum, and there were nowhere near enough people compared to previous Christmas Eves. Even the traffic from the casinos, which could always be counted on to be moving at a brisk pace was slow almost to the point of nonexistence. Parker had been certain that even on the day of the apocalypse, Jesus and the devil would be standing in the street, still trying to convince some of those people to let go of the one-armed bandits and get in line.
The air was perhaps the worst; every breath he took, or watched someone else take, could be seen pluming in the air, and none of them looked good. Most of them had a tarry look and texture to them, and his own swirled with colors that moved too quickly for him to identify. He didn’t see anyone else’s looking that way, but he saw plenty who looked worse. He still wasn’t sure what it meant but thought it had something to do with whatever had been done to him back at the morgue. The plumes joined the air and turned everything that same chalky black, with the occasional hint of color. It clung to the buildings and settled in the streets, making Parker want to start grabbing people and shaking them while shrieking, “Don’t you see it?” into their faces. He resisted the urge, but not easily.
After some time, he had found himself there, without remembering exactly how he’d gotten to this point. He remembered, the way you remember a bit of a dream upon waking, that he had intended to call in and see if anyone had seen Drakanis, Woods, or Brokov and then discarded the idea; he wasn’t sure what had made him ignore the impulse and couldn’t remember for certain. He thought whatever internal tour guide had been leading him had decided it would be a bad idea. Part of him didn’t like the thought; the idea that he was little more than a puppet doing what he was told and going where he was supposed to chafed heavily against him. Still, the part of him that would have once stood up and started hollering at such orders seemed distant and far away, submerged under all the new sights and sounds, the new layers the world had developed while he had been out of it.
He still hadn’t looked too closely under his shirt; something inside told him that would be a bad idea. He could live with the continued fiction—and the inner voice acknowledged that much, if not his conscious mind—that his vest had stopped the bullet, that the shot had gone wild or any of a hundred other excuses he could concoct for his survival. Considering the alternative was stepping slightly further outside the rules of reality than he was willing to go.
After a time, the magnetic pull in his guts had brought him to this place, which stood in contrast to the rest of town; unlike everywhere else, where things felt deserted but where you could still find a trace or two of life if you looked, the Silverado appeared to be completely abandoned. It was one of the few places he had been that wasn’t covered in strange colors and that wasn’t putting out some vibe or another; to him, it felt like the place was dead, on every possible level. Of course, that left him wondering why he had come there at all.
Parker glanced upward. Speaking to nobody in particular since he was certain he was alone, he sounded tired and put out. “All right. Now what?”
The answer didn’t take long in coming; this time, the tug felt like someone had physically shoved a hand into his chest, grabbed hold of his spine, and started dragging him forward. His feet went of their own accord, though he stumbled at first. They propelled him through the wide double doors and into the casino floor.
In here, it was even worse than outside. To stand outside the building and think that it looked deserted wasn’t all that bad when compared to looking around a casino covered in lights and with bells ringing, to see credits still in the machines and change lights left on, with nobody to play or answer the bells.
Jesus Christ, what the fuck happened here? It’s like the goddamn Mary Celeste or some shit. Of course, Parker didn’t have to think long to know what had happened. Karim had happened. The talu`shar had happened. Whether these people were dead, trapped inside the painting, or on vacation in Tahiti really didn’t matter one way or the other; what did was that they were no longer there.
The air inside the casino felt stale and oppressive, devoid of any of the things that humans needed to pull from it to keep living. He wondered for a moment if it was safe to be in there and then found himself laughing about the idea. It wasn’t as if he had a choice, now was it? All there was to do was keep moving and hope he could find the others; he was sure they were there, or at least had been. He knew Karim was still on site, at least, from the vibe he was getting in the air.
He felt another internal shove. He could almost hear the voice in his head that had woken him, telling him, “Enough gawking. Time is short,” and got his feet moving again, past a bank of slot machines, one of which was ringing for a jackpot that would in all likelihood never be paid, and toward the hanging sign that told him in garish neon letters “Hotel Desk.”
He wouldn’t have reacted as quickly as he did if he hadn’t had warning. As he passed the last machine in the row, he glanced briefly at the shining chrome and red-white-and-blue theme of the Uncle Sam machine, and all the slots in the row flickered for a moment, the bells on them stuttering before resuming. He heard someone mutter, “Motherfucker…” in the brief second of silence and felt the wire in his gut tighten. He didn’t think about what to do; he just threw himself forward, rolling on the carpet and into the next row of machines an instant before the bells were silenced permanently by some form of explosion.
His heightened senses and the additional input from his second sight told him what he needed to know: Taeda was out there on the floor, whipping up some form of death and destruction for him. Bitch. Need to try again, huh? He wasn’t sure where she was—the weird air in the place seemed to be screwing up all his perceptions, including the new ones—but he could tell it was her. He could also smell something else coming off of her, blended into the psychic marker that identified her; it made him think of sulfur and death, and he knew it as the mark of the talu`shar.
Another row of machines to his left flickered and then exploded. This time, he saw what happened but wasn’t sure how to interpret it; one moment, the machines were sitting there, blinking happily and playing whatever annoying tune they had been programmed to play. The next, they were surrounded by a pulsing globe of black and purple light that tightened around them and then seemed to fold in on itself with a thunderous noise, leaving broken machinery behind.
“I know you’re here,” he heard Taeda whisper with irritation. “So why don’t you come out and play? We would love to see you.”
He grinned to himself, thinking of how much he’d like to see her in a place of his choosing. The thought of laying Taeda out and beating her half to death with his bare hands was rather attractive at the moment. He didn’t think he had time to be leisurely though. If she was there and gunning for him, then he was probably expected. That mean
t the others were in deeper shit than they might have been otherwise, by his reckoning.
He bobbed up from behind the bank he’d rolled under, twiddling his fingers in the direction he’d heard her voice coming from.
“Hey, baby. Didn’t know you missed me!” He dove back into the shadows and then bobbed to the right, ducking into the shadows cast by the Wheel of Fortune machine’s lights.
“You should have stayed down.” Her voice was closer than he cared to hear it, maybe ten feet in front of him; he didn’t see how that was possible, since he couldn’t see her, but his ears usually didn’t lie to him. “I think I liked you better that way.” That gave him a start, since this time, her voice seemed to be coming from behind him but at the same distance. How she could have gotten there that fast he didn’t know and wasn’t sure that he wanted to.
Another pair of machines shorted out, the cheering cry of “Wheel! Of! Fortune!” getting cut off in the series of pops and crackles as Taeda did whatever it was she was doing to that bank. Parker moved again, glancing behind him; he was running out of room to maneuver. Pretty soon, his ass would be against the wall, lit clearly by the exit sign and the additional lighting around the ATM machine nestled in the wall grotto there.
“Why don’t you quit playing, Parker? You’re washed up, and you know it. You could always join the winning team, even if you are an asshole.”
The mirth in her voice sounded genuine. Parker was sure she’d like to see him beg for his life and give in to the thing to which she’d sold her soul. He hadn’t known her very well—their circles rarely mixed, and he didn’t have a lot of love for the younger breed of cops these days—but he’d heard that she had a problem with authority and liked rubbing it in people’s faces when she was on top. He didn’t think giving in was really an option though. She might take a surrender, but he doubted that whatever force had brought him here would let him do it. Besides, he had just as much of a problem with orders as she did, if not more, and he wasn’t about to give up.
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