Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  Devlin had run into a fellow agent suffering from ODD a few years back. Talented young thing by the name of Amour, of all things. Awful, whorish sounding name, but a brilliant agent with a long, colorful career in her future. Or … could have had. The bulky, over-the-eyes-altogether lenses that ODD-sufferers worldwide had to wear weren’t especially conducive to remaining unnoticed, so while Amour definitely had the skills to skyrocket through the Bureau, she was going to have to take the longer, less vibrant path to success.

  “Anyways,” Rommen couldn’t help it. He shoveled a piece of salami into his mouth, added a few pieces of cheese and a baby pickle, then continued on, “he developed those lenses instead. I don’t really understand it. They’re made out of some kind of specialized flexible OLED stuff. Like you see. You know, for wearable tech. I’m sure it’s more complicated than I’m making it sound. Most of the things Garth does is … complicated.”

  Devlin nodded again, this time slowly, this time, with very deep understanding. "I can see how that would be true. It must be difficult, working for someone like that. Always keeping you on your toes all the time, making decisions that undermine you every step of the way."

  Rommen swallowed his mouthful of food, aching to comment further on the life you lived when working with Garth Nickels, but he kept his yapper shut on the grounds that he was damn near certain that she was trying to bait him. "Is there anything else I can help you with, Special Agent Devlin?"

  Special Agent Devlin accepted the brush off. It was just more of a sign that Rommen was under precisely the sort of pressure that Nickels had outlined for her. That, combined with his odd behavior right there, and Devlin had to admit that Garth -who reeked of untrustworthiness and deceit- was on the up and up. She nodded cordially to Rommen, spared a glance farewell to Garth, who was currently embroiled in his laptop and left.

  Rommen watched Devlin leave the green room, consciously aware that he was burning holes into her back, and not caring. Garth was a smart man. Garth traveled through time, at least on the mental plane. His diatribe on Destiny and all of that was unmistakable; his soon-to-be ex-employer had to be aware of the identity of the man who'd tried unsuccessfully to assassinate him on this day, at the appointed time, and had gone to the effort of trying to ensure that it wouldn't happen.

  But Rommen knew something that Garth didn't. Or hadn't realized. Going on and on as he had had given the man who'd end his life all the ammunition he needed to make damn sure that when the trigger was pulled and the bullet was fired that one Garth Nickels would be dead on the floor.

  The trick was to get the man right in the skull. Destroy the brain. Turn it into mush. Preferably with an exit wound the size of adult man's fist in the back of the skull, with everything not mush leaking out onto the floor for the whole world to see.

  "Hey, boss."

  Garth didn't bother looking up from his laptop, which was nice; somehow, Garth's solution to the ODD syndrome was even more unsettling than the heavy, almost gaudy external lens caps that'd been the only choice. The glinting lenses made him look sinister.

  "Yeah, buddy, what's up?"

  "I'm going to reconnoiter. Get a better lay of the land. I've been here a few times already, but with the crowds, I'd really like to get a feel for the people. Even with Devlin here and all the security already in place, you made yourself quite a few enemies in the last couple months. You going to be all right on your own?" Rommen shoved some food into his pockets, only peripherally aware that the behavior was both strange and awkward looking. Protein on a mission was key. You never knew when your next meal would be.

  "Hm?" Garth looked up, saw Rommen shoving sausages into his pockets. He'd seen people do stranger things than that, so let it slide. "No, yeah, I'm totes cool over here, bro. Working on some last minute additions to my speech, then I might just fart around on the Internet. You do what you've got to do."

  "All right. I shouldn't be long." Rommen pushed his way out of the green room and proceeded to make it appear as though he was doing just as he'd told Garth by adopting a meaningful, busied look and engaging in the beginning steps of a very obvious perimeter sweep.

  Harried spokespeople and display techs and bloggers and journalists and presumably some of Devlin's team crested around Rommen without looking in his direction, almost as if they were all aware that he was on the Path of Righteous Destiny, that soon, the world would change. For the better. Because of him.

  Only him.

  When he was certain that Garth wasn't following him -you could rely on the fact that most of the time, when the man seemed at his most relaxed and easygoing, that he was quite the opposite- Rommen made a beeline for one of the very few doors that were open to the public. He flashed his visitor's badge to the idle security guard on deck, stepped outside, and went to make a call that would change the parameters of Garth's game.

  Behind him, barely heard, and even then, not even registered…

  “Hello? Are you fu…”

  ***

  Officer Brock Brody squinted at the tall, good-looking guy who'd just pushed past him to get outside. "Murph. Hey, Murph."

  'Murph', who was loitering off to one side, trying to get some girl's phone number before she realized that he suffered from both male pattern baldness and actually had some pretty weak game when he wasn't in uniform, shot an exasperated glare at his partner. "What? What could be so goddamn impor... ahhh, shit, Brody. You've gotta be kidding me."

  Brody gestured for Murph to get back to his post. "Dude, get over here and tell me you don't see this."

  Murph looked for the girl -Sasha or something like Sasha, maybe Barbara but for sure ending in an 'A'- in the crowds, but alas, she of the long red hair and the cute freckles had faded from view as surely as a mirage. Defeated, Murph walked slowly over to their shared podium, dragging his heels the whole way, just so Brody'd understand that not everything was important.

  "What." Murph settled in beside Brody, planting his feet squarely on his side of the comfort mat on the ground. "What could be so fuck... is that guy talking on a cellphone wrapped in tinfoil?"

  "So, you're seeing it too?" Brody was glad he wasn't hallucinating. The half a pot brownie he'd eaten before coming in to work had him on a pretty rad level. He didn't want to flip out. Not on the job.

  "Uh, yeah?" Murph and Brody watched the animated antics of the tall guy with the tinfoil-wrapped cellphone for a few minutes, each silently debating what -if anything- would be the right course of action should the dude want to come back in. "Guy's a freakazoid."

  Brody pursed his lips. "You think we should let him back in?"

  That was a fair question.

  Technical conventions like this had a tendency to flush all the mouth-breathers out of their basements, and that was just regular people who liked seeing what was what. Christ, they'd already had to turn back more than a dozen bloggers, each of whom had apparently never seen sunlight before and who'd possessed a shocking lack of awareness as to what they could and could not bring to a Convention of this caliber. Random liquids in dodgy looking containers, outside food wrapped in soggy napkins, the occasional stun gun and quasi-legal bear mace canisters did not for a happy security team make.

  Murph responded with his own round of pursed lips. "You get the guy's name off his badge?"

  "Yeah. Uh. Rommel. Himmel? Rommen. Rommen for sure." Brody plucked at a lip. "No. Not ... hah. Rommen deShure."

  Murph flipped through the logbook and found the geek's name right at the very top of the list. "Well, shit. Looks like unless he starts shrieking like a howler monkey and flinging his own poo at folks we gotta to let him back in."

  "Why? Who's he with?" Brody leaned over and peered at the list. "Ohhhh, shit! You play that game, man? That Specter jam? That's my shit right there!"

  Murph waved his hands in the air. "Nah, man, you don't know the half of it. Bro, the other day I'm in this solar system called Gallifral, right? All these sentient sponges everywhere, and I'm like, trying to find a fuck
ing NPC I can talk to, okay, and right in the middle of this, this huge fucking thing with eight legs shows up and starts killing sponges. I killed it. Got a medal, an accomplishment, and something called a Bovine Cannon. Didn't have a chance to try it out, but I did spend some time investigating the animal. Turns out that the thing had escaped from a local zoo. Crazy, crazy depth!"

  "Man, I legit wandered around this ghost town in this place called 'Ekermann's Regret' for like, five hour the other day and I ... ah, fuck, here he comes. Pretend we don't see him."

  Rommen scuttled by, munching on a pickle rescued from his pocket, not bothering to make eye contact with the security guards or even flashing his ID badge. He was a man on a mission and his mission was to save the future.

  Murph rolled his eyes. "You see that, bro?"

  "Dude. Pickle. From his pocket. That's fucked." Brody twiddled his radio button, feeling like they should say something to someone about Rommen deShure and his tinfoil wrapped cellphone. Possibly, for added extra proof, bringing up the pickles and who knew what else was in the man's pockets might be enough to push someone's buttons in the right way. "You think?"

  Murphy shook his head steadfastly. "You were busy dealing with the worst part of your, uh, breakfast brownie when Sterman covered the veeps that’re here today, and veepest of the veeps is this Nickels character. Keynote speaker of the whole shebang. Now, you and I know that he deserves the recognition for the game alone, but the other shit he's done is off the charts. So if he wants to have a weird fuckin' security guard run around talking into tinfoil wrapped cellphones and eating food out of his pockets, then that's that. 'sides which, Feds’re here, and I’m pretty sure the unmarked Humvees around the back are full of actual fucking Army dudes. So … fuck it. You were telling me about this place called 'Ekermann's Regret'. Never heard of it. Which solar cluster?"

  "Mm. Winderwing? Is that right? I fell into a white hole..."

  ***

  Right that second...

  "Now, hold your goddamn horses, General Abercrombie and Fitch." Garth shouted loudly, winking widely to the people with cameras. They believed they'd be keeping the footage on their phones and cameras and laptops, so for the time being it was an extra bit of fun for him. "Are you suggesting that I straight up give you access to all my shit? For free? That's bonkers. Didn’t you see that stupid movie with that guy and the suit? Even in the movies no one is that stupid!"

  He was feeling very much like Tony Starks in Avengers 2, though in that particular movie, Garth couldn’t quite recall the moment when Starks had had guns pointed at him.

  Just his life, he supposed, throwing wrinkles into the mix. Besides, he figured he really was more comfortable with all the guys and their guns than a roomful of quiet, serious-looking older politicians who were all sorts of traditional evil; a kind of meeting like that, with him in it … might not end with some polite swearing and a dramatic exit off stage.

  Up on the fancy-dancy stairwell of glass and steel and pretty carpets that overlooked the main area of the Convention Center, Garth kept one augmented eye on Rommen deShure as he crept steadily through the small crowd of onlookers, moving in a pattern that he imagined was stealthy. The feed on the laptop indicated that Devlin and her team had all kinds of eyes on the idiot, so he dropped his attention to Angry 4 Star General and his All-American Band of Idjits.

  Garth felt a moment of woe for Rommen deShure. Born in the digital fires of the Emperor-for-Life Etienne Marseille’s dreams and trotted straight into Baron Samiel’s ever-hungry grasp, the weary young soldier had been nothing more than a target this whole time. Regardless of his beliefs on the nature of the existence they were all currently slogging through, and his absolute conviction that everyone around him was nothing more than a very well written NPC, it was difficult to see someone he’d confided in falling so hard.

  Down on the floor, Habercome blustered his way into finding an answer. “It has been brought to my attention, Mister Nickels, that you fool with the very underpinnings of existence! Time travel, perhaps, or some other form of force too bold and big for your hands alone to touch! This is America, sir, not Nazi Germany! You put people’s lives at risk every second you fiddle with these forces!”

  “Hey, General. Hey, hey, general!” Garth winked naughtily. “If I’m gonna be fiddling with any forces, you can rest assured that it’s gonna be consensual fiddling and that nothing unplanned is going to happen.”

  Damn Rommen. Damn him!

  The quick little quip wasn’t having the intended effect –that of drawing attention away from the General’s claims- but rather, the opposite; those very same intrepid reporters, all of whom had been stripped from Internet access, were now engaging in the time-honored tradition of trying to beat each other senseless for random pens and whatever scraps of paper they could lay their hands on, all so they could record the important bits of what was happening this day.

  Under normal circumstances, allegations of time-travel tomfoolery might not even reach the newspaper, or might –in the case of an online source- only be ‘WTF-worthy’- but when you were dealing with a recluse who, only a few moments ago, hijacked everyone’s electronic device and who had the creepiest looking eyes this side of the fucking planet, not only was everyone listening very carefully, they were buying the story hook, line and sinker.

  Garth pursed his lips. He felt like he hadn’t thought this part of the adventure through very carefully. The General was a bit of a snag, that was for damn sure.

  "Oh yeah, and, uh, Nazi Germany? Too soon, bro, too soon." Garth ... didn't know what to say or do.

  Habercome ground his teeth in frustration. Some of his men were trying to hunt for Rommen, but they just couldn’t get eyes on; with all of their equipment down for the count, somehow stolen away from them at the press of a button, they were all relying on their own eyes, and there were so many people in the convention center.

  Their man was out there, somewhere, suffering, and it bothered Habercome he couldn’t do anything about it until well after they’d handled Nickels, even if the timbre of the ex-soldier’s voice … Habercome knew that sound.

  Had heard it dozens of time before. Coming out of the mouths of his friends. Out of his own, if he were being honest. deShure was cracked, but not completely. There was a chance to walk away from the madness and get the kind of help that only Maiden America could provide.

  Sadly, Nickels was a higher priority than saving a fallen soldier. The shit of it was, no matter how cracked Rommen was right then, he was still sane enough to realize that fact.

  And play with whatever hand he was dealt accordingly.

  Habercome whispered to one of his aides, who stood by his side, trying different tactics to hotwire themselves some commlines. “Do we have any eyes on the Feds? This whole thing has gone sideways on us. If we hit Pear Shape, it won’t go so well for us, even if we are in the right.”

  Winnit dropped his screwdriver and cursed up a storm before trailing off into some angry lip-moving. “Sir, the last sitrep we had on the Federal angle is fifteen minutes old. At that time, one of our men had eyes on Special Agent Angela Devlin. She was issuing orders to some other Federal agents, but that’s it. Assessment of her gameplay stance in a situation like this tells us she’s got more than five, possibly as many as a dozen, infiltrated into the audience. Without our gear, we can’t track them. They look just like …everyone else.”

  “This whole thing is fucked.” Interest in Nickels, especially from certain … groups … within the US governmental and military structure, had always been high. How could it not be? The man was proving to be the kind of genius they needed on tap, especially when Americans were being painted as excessively violent, ponderously stupid, and criminally incapable of getting their shit together.

  They’d all been strong-armed by Devlin’s offices. And the President. And basically everyone, everywhere, by anyone with power. The goal was to achieve greatness through application of science, methodology, and freedom. Corrall
ing talent, parking them in a sub-basement, tickling inventions out of them with very mild torture and the use of brain-bending drugs … that wasn’t how those powers-that-were thought it should be done.

  “Couldn’t you have called me a little sooner, boy?” Habercome wanted to punch Nickels right in his smug face. The idiot was up there, enjoying himself far too much. The idiot believed he was going to come out of this on top.

  It was time to prove the idiot wrong. But there’d be one last chance for common courtesy and wisdom to rule the day. After that, it was time to speed things along.

  Eyeballing the General like a particularly handsome hawk, Garth tapped a fresh command into the laptop just as the man’s mouth was about to open.

  “The interesting thing,” Garth could not keep the shit-eating grin from his face, “about my tech is that it’s the best tech out there. Wherever it is, there I am, and wherever I am, I’m listening.”

  “Do we have any eyes on the Feds? This whole thing has gone sideways on us. If we hit Pear Shape, it’s not going to go so well for us, even if we are in the right.”

  The whispered words rolled through the entire convention center. Even those people who’d given up hope and were treating this as some kind of very strange hostage-taking scenario perked up their heads a wee bit as General Habercome’s words were heard.

  Up on the fancy glass-and-metal stair thing, there was an oh-so-brief pause in motion that drew Garth’s eyes.

  Rommen.

  Looking ashamed and guilty and still determined to do what needed to be done. Other faint tendrils of movement pulled at Garth’s attention. Devlin’s plants, all finally making contact on their target with their own eyes, all finally moving to snap the guy up before he did something everyone in the room was going to regret.

  Some few of the General’s men saw the bit of excitement and started up a whisper campaign to get the Intel to where it needed to be.

  “I suppose it’s going to be too much to hope that this particular game of telephone will screw the message up.”