The Resurrection Pact (Winston Casey Chronicles Book 1)

by Jay Smith

  I inhaled sweet, chemical mist and felt lightheaded. The light-headed part came from what Parker just said. "Seventeen what of what now? And why the fuck did you set me up like this, fool? At least put a fucking message on the laptop or tell your spooky phone lady to fuckin' tell me…"

  "Calm down," the hologram advised, stepping back and reverting to a jarring, abrupt mood swing. "Everything's cool. We're cool."

  The hologram didn't know how to respond to me or the situation.

  "Fuck me with this Tron bullshit Obi Wan Kenobi on the god-damned holodeck."

  Holo-Parker didn't respond at all. It just tracked my eye-line and waited for me to provide meaningful input.

  "Okay. What would I do if I found the laptop?"

  "Accept the inventory transfer and review all the documents and new inventory items I shifted to your account. That material is your protection. If you have it, Alan can't touch you. Plus, you get a war chest that hurts him. Every gold piece I ever earned in Aeternus and all the liquidated property and inventory gets turned to cash through the same banks that Alan uses."

  "And you think giving me seventeen million dollars is a fucking good thing?" I almost tried to sit down on a nearby chair before remembering it was all light and mist. "Fuck it. I'll give it all back. I'll just transfer it back and…"

  "You don't have the laptop," Parker corrected me. "It will just sit in an untouchable account. If you're lucky, he'll just blame me. Unless you managed to piss him off somehow already."

  "Can you tell what's happening in your manor house right now?"

  "Yes. All my inventory items have been converted to gold pieces. I've just sold the manor house and the estate server to Vespar Vellum. The estate is now locked down for terraforming and reset prior to resale. Four of Alan's Knights were just ejected from the server holding the property. "

  "I guess it's fair to say they know you just liquidated everything."

  "We don't have a lot of time. You have to retrieve the laptop and confirm the transfer within 48 hours or the bank takes everything and you end up with no protection from Alan or his anger issues."

  "Well. Thanks."

  "And there are some other things you need to know."

  "I have a twin sister with Jedi powers, right?"

  "Grant Parker was a bad person. You're going to learn this. He – I – did bad things and let bad things happen."

  "You were in porn movies with Carla and Ezrin."

  "I directed them in fetish movies. Ezrin did them because she wanted to. Carla did them because she needed the money. I did them because I didn't want either of them working with Dennis Reilly."

  "You shot them in Harrisburg – at the Safe House."

  "They were shot at various Safe Houses around the country."

  "What do you mean Ezrin wanted to do those videos?"

  "Ezrin enjoys being forced, so long as she can be dominated in a fair fight. This deviates from the message I need to convey to you, Winston. I worked undercover as a military police officer. I am married to a woman I saved from a slavery ring."

  "Nadeim."

  "Yes. She served as an interpreter for our unit while returning the women to their villages. My operation was shut down when we discovered that the CIA was using the same traffickers to move arms and supplies to Syrian partisans working against Assad. That's when I was transferred to recruiting duty."

  "Why? Did you threaten to go to the press?"

  "I'd never do that. But we uncovered a connection to an American trafficking network from Panama to Canada. King Kline and I were looking into something really disturbing. Missing kids, missing women, migrants… passing through Aeternus in Las Vegas and Atlan – "

  Parker froze for a moment, then engaged.

  "Winston, there are Knights coming to the holography level. You must leave, now. There's evidence in the laptop. Find it. Finish it."

  The suite shut down and the doors parted.

  The elevator light lit just as I slipped into the stairwell at the end of the hall.

  My phone went off two floors down.

  PART SEVEN

  Aeternus Resort

  "We seek out those who see us as we wish to be. In Aeternus, online and in our society, we allow you to become something the real world can never understand. Become your ideal and transform yourself, shape yourself, become yourself in Aeternus!"

  - Alan Horus, DrakkenCon 27

  (presentation "The Aeternal Church")

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  "Hey, Diane."

  I kept two-stepping the stairs as quiet as I could, passing security cameras at every door and thinking it didn't matter if I kept going or doubled back to my room.

  "I missed my Zumba session at the church because I was researching your stuff so I skipped lunch."

  "We should get to it, then."

  Diane snorted. "Wow. You okay or are you trying out being a dick?"

  That shook me out of my funk. "No…sorry, Diane. Things just got weird here and I'm trying to work it out in my head. Just a little anxious for your intel."

  "Intel."

  "Yeah, your research. I might be in more trouble than I thought and there are people who, uh…"

  "Uh what?"

  "People are looking for me. And I might have just accidentally taken seventeen million dollars from some very bad people."

  "I see. Then we should get to it, then, huh?"

  "Yeah."

  "Can you get out of Vegas?"

  "Probably. I don't know. I'm being watched."

  "Anything I could tell you right now can wait. Call the police and say whatever you need to say so they keep an eye on you. Go to the airport and come home. We'll talk when you get here."

  "But…I don't…"

  "Make it happen. I can't rescue you."

  "Do me a favor…" I pulled out Officer Brask's business card from my back pocket and gave Diane his cell and badge number. I warned her about Detective Hinkle and asked her to give Brask a heads-up in case I disappeared.

  All that was left to do was find Ezrin and get the hell out of Vegas.

  Just that.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I was in the bathroom when a band of gorillas burst into the suite charging past the bathroom door toward the master bed room. If I didn't make a habit of peeing in the dark, I'm sure the door would have come down right away. By the time I got my boxers up the suite filled with alarming sounds of breaking glass and falling bodies.

  Harsh, bright light flared from under the doorway. That light dimmed slightly as someone broke a lamp or three off in the living room.

  "WINSTON!" It was Ezrin calling, followed by an expensive sounding smash and a heavy thud that clearly wasn't Ezrin because it was followed by her warrior cry and more breaking of things with the bodies of people.

  I opened the bathroom door to see a shaved ape in a suit lumbering toward me. I had enough time to dodge, but in the narrow hallway I could only try to go through him. I may as well have decided to walk through the plaster wall instead. I bounced off the guy and landed on my butt, crab-walked backward as the gorilla advanced, then rolled around a corner into the living area.

  In a matter of seconds many things happened that play out in my mind across minutes. Someone lifted me into the air and spun me around so hard that I lost my sense of direction. What light there was in the room made me clamp my eyes shut. I saw a flutter of red hair in the distance surrounded by black suits and then a vicious crackle of electricity. Someone handed me a ball of clothing. Ezrin screamed. I shut out the light. The hands holding me up by my shoulders opened up and I fell to the floor.

  "Get dressed!" someone barked as a sneaker hit me across the head.

  Ezrin screamed again. I tried to get back up but took another sneaker across the face. I pried my eyes open. Ezrin's legs stuck out from under a pile of gorillas. She was face down. I remembered the ball of fabric clutched to my gut.

  "Don't hurt her," I yelled as though it meant something.
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  The gorilla behind me said, "Get dressed and come on and we won't. Move it, sir."

  As well as I can recall it, four gorillas stayed behind with Ezrin and two led me away to an open elevator held by an additional gorilla.

  A few minutes later we were in the basement, passing signs for the IT Department and Housekeeping. The last sign I noticed was the one marked DUNGEON.

  The dungeon was a security holding area behind a heavy steel door. The front section looked like a kennel in a dog shelter and smelled like chemicals. They dragged me past this to the door on the opposite wall, opened it up and threw me inside.

  Gray, cold concrete on all sides.

  Darkness when they shut the door.

  They held me there for hours, so long I fell asleep and woke up screaming in the dark because I couldn't remember where I was. Shaking from the cold I called out for anyone to let me out. I walked the walls of my ten by ten cell several times, convinced they were moving in on me.

  "Calm down," Parker said. "You're not dead."

  "They are so pissed off right now. I didn't take that money. It was just…it transferred out. Parker did that! YOU did that."

  "I'm no more Parker than that fucking light show in the holodeck was. You gotta accept this. You should accept the reality that every bold decision you've made here, every nagging voice you've heard from me has been YOU. YOU can't accept that you can make the hard decisions. But right now, man, you got nothing else to go on. Grant Parker is dead and you must let this stupid Captain America idea go before it kills you. Put it all together, man."

  Grant Parker had a secret war bride while keeping a girlfriend in the states. He worked security for a very bad man involved in human trafficking. He starred in rape porn. Whatever happened to Carla began a long time ago with empty promises and ended with a branding and then murder. On top of it all he was using me to carry out his final FUCK YOU against his old boss and it was likely that I was too stupid to realize it and therefore too stupid to live.

  He's going to shoot me.

  No, I replied to myself. He wants the money back. THEN he'll shoot you.

  But I can't get it back.

  So I'll have to be clever and bide my time to figure a way out of this.

  ~

  The minutes bled into hours as I drifted in and out of a freezing sleep. Eventually, the door opened and blinded me with the overhead of the kennels beyond. Too tired to move, two men dragged me out, forcing me to walk back down the hall and into a blessedly dark parking garage. There, even more gorillas – the surly and tattooed ones, not the chorus line posers – waited around a shiny, black limo. I got in the passenger side next to a gorilla sitting across from another gorilla who sat next to a bored looking Alan Horus.

  These gorillas hugged automatic pistols to their chests and didn't relax until it was clear I was just going to sit back and not, I guess, try to tear the uvula from Alan's throat. Alan sat back with his Magic Book in an outfit that made me think we were on our way to a Jimmy Buffett concert – a loud, Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts. The Marlins baseball cap was an interesting accessory. He didn't even acknowledge me. When the limo door shut, all he said was…

  "Drive."

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Night in the desert, scared for my life.

  The interior of the Lincoln limo was cool and quiet, no music but the soothing rumble of the desert highway below us. This did nothing to dispel the uncomfortable silence among the goon squad and Horus himself. He did his best to ignore me by focusing on his Magic Book. I pretended not to notice just like I would on the drive home from one of many unsatisfying vacations with my ex-wife. This time, however, armed goons stood in for the passive aggressive tension.

  In addition to the driver and "shotgun" goons up front, the party compartment in back offered two other beefy specimens in suits and shades, one next to me and the other next to Horus. They, too, were silent and cool as we drove through the night.

  Maybe it was pride, but I didn’t want to be the one to start asking. I had a feeling that a narcissist like Horus would burst if he couldn’t brag about his master plan or make threats. For about ten minutes I battled my own curiosity and fear while Horus read his Magic Book. I wasn’t going to give the smug bastard any pleasure.

  The world outside was as black as deep space. I could see nothing but the occasional reflective strip flashing by the window at high speed or a single light in the distance.

  A few minutes later, the limo turned off the highway and we traveled another ten minutes over rough terrain. Of course, the limo smoothed out most of the journey, but even the Meat Brothers next to us had to steady themselves a few times. Unable to focus on his Magic Book, Horus finally decided to acknowledge me.

  "Steady on, Winston. Almost there," he said as though I were there by choice and knew where ‘there’ was. "I wanted to share a sunrise with you. I think it’s important that we understand one another and our place in the universe. Don’t you?"

  "The calendar on the Magic Book works great. And I could have slept in my own bed last night."

  "Heh. Less exciting, though." He grinned. "Don’t worry. I thought you might decline my invitation after your latest sleuthing expedition."

  "I’ve been sleuthing? I thought this was a big mystery I had to solve. I’m on vacation, remember?"

  "Yes. Permanently, I understand. You lost your job while lounging around our Safe House in Pennsylvania."

  "You say that like I was hiding something from you. You’ve been monitoring me from the moment I walked into the Peppermint Casino."

  "Indeed."

  By the number of teeth visible in his smile, I knew Horus would do something to kill my confident façade very soon.

  "Oh, Winston. This was inevitable. When Grant Parker set you on your little quest, he knew it would bring you here."

  The car slowed to a gentle stop, turning left sharply as if into a parking spot. While the sky had lightened up a bit to the east, the only thing clearly defined by the window was my own reflection; and I looked terrified; terrified and exhausted.

  One of the goons opened the door and stepped out. The other pointed to the handle of his shoulder piece and then to the open door in the universal sign for "Get the fuck out or I'll shoot you in the face, please."

  Horus remained relaxed and happy as I slid across the seat to the door. The dry heat hit in the doorway like someone put a heavy wool blanket over me. I could only see ahead as far as the limo's headlights. There wasn't much to see, just dirt and dried scrub. The faintest light to the east formed a jagged horizon of low mountains, maybe hills.

  When Horus popped his head up over the roof of the limo on the opposite side, he scanned the darkness and then the sky like he expected something to be there. His goon exited behind him and followed up to the front of the car.

  The driver cut the engine and switched off the headlights, leaving us under starlight and pre-dawn precisely at the border between night and day. The softer hues of morning bled into the sky, snuffing the stars like gaslights at daybreak. If not for the circumstances, it would be a glorious experience.

  "This is a sacred place for me, Winston."

  "I’m stunned," I admitted.

  "I was like you, once. I can still remember being like you."

  I chuckled nervously. "I thought you burst fully formed from the nut sack of Zeus or something."

  "You want to know how I got to where I am today?"

  Better than a bullet to the head, I guessed. "Sure."

  "I was lost, Winston. I truly was. Drunk, stoned all the time because my career was terrible. I had just been let go by Wendland-Peeler Books and my first agent had all but given up on me. I don’t blame her. I was a wreck of a human being."

  He folded his arms and stared off at the eastern sky, now orange with first light and purple with prose.

  "My most successful book to date was a book based on a silly video game. All my fantasy stories flopped with all but an enlightened
few."

  Horus stared out into the desert. I was just his audience.

  "So I drove out here – to this spot, actually – and started walking that way." He pointed east into the desert, perhaps to the distant serrated range on the distant horizon. "I was like you. Lost. Failed. Wondering why life decided to deny me what I thought I deserved."

  "You charmer. So, you walked off into the desert. Did you find your burning bush, Moses?"

  "Better. I found a body."

  "I what-now?"

  "A corpse on the desert floor about five miles that way."

  Horus told the story of his journey into the desert. Without knowing why or where he was going, he just kept walking. At some point, he came across the body of a man in a suit face-down in the dirt, a single bullet hole in the back of his bald head. Horus described him as very tall and "well dressed" despite looking like the end of a rotisserie chicken dinner in a shredded business suit. Crazed by dehydration and desperate for a sign telling him what to do, he rifled through the remains, checking the pockets for a container of water or a phone he could use to call for help. The remains were gray jerky on bone. What the buzzards left behind stiffened and stretched tight over the skeleton like leather. The dirty, bloodied suit provided him nothing but a small velvet bag he fished from inside the lining of the coat.

  "Inside were a dozen tiny angel tears that changed my destiny."

  "Oh! Like from the third book where your counterpart finds the Tears of Aeternus on the old wizard lying dead where the Lord’s Castle now stands."

  "You actually read it. I'm honored."

  "We’re out in the desert heat so – what - you can tell me your origin story, Alan?"