by Jon Land
“Ahhhhh!” he screamed, and drove the blade hard into Peet’s side.
Peet howled in agony, his life saved only when the blade bit into a rib and wedged there. Tiny Tim tried to yank it out to mount a killing strike, but Peet locked his hand over Seckle’s to hold the blade in place. Tiny Tim twisted, turned it, and Peet bellowed some more, still holding firm. Seckle’s head was coming up now, winning the fight against Peet’s determined hand. At last Tiny Tim removed the hand that had been maintaining the stalemate from Peet’s arm and began to slam him again and again in the soft side ribs.
The cracks sounded like gunshots as the ribs gave, but Peet wasn’t finished. He released his hold on Tiny Tim’s chin, and when the monster beneath him mounted the expected surge, he lashed him across the bridge of the nose with the tubing he still held. Tiny Tim greeted the blow with a burst of rage that allowed him to drive the knife stuck in Peet all the way through the bone. Peet responded with a wild strike from his hose that shattered Tiny Tim’s teeth. He spit them up at Peet and buried the knife in him up to the hilt.
In the agony that resulted, forcing his teeth through his bottom lip, Winston Peet saw his only chance. When Tiny Tim tried to withdraw the knife this time, Peet let him, looping his piece of tubing through the gap in the catwalk and hoping it held. Tiny Tim lunged with the knife, and Peet simply went with the move, pushing off with his feet in the same motion. The knife made a neat, shallow tear just over his navel, and the two giants dropped from the catwalk together. The tubing stretched but held over the climbing flames, and Peet hung by it with his right hand. Beneath him Tiny Tim was clinging to Peet’s belt with his left hand, his right still holding fast to the knife. He whipped it at Peet in wild swipes that drew blood on each occasion, until Peet dropped his free hand downward and did the only thing he could.
He grabbed the blade in his bare hand, accepted the agony and the blood, because now Tiny Tim was powerless. Peet began to thrash his legs wildly to throw him off. Tiny Tim lost his hold at last, and the blade tore from Peet’s bloodied grip. Seckle slid downward and, in a desperate swipe, grasped one of Peet’s feet, arresting his fall. The monster smiled as he began to climb up his leg, still clutching the knife.
Peet kicked both legs viciously but to no avail. Then, as he was trying to find another way to shed the monster, a huge gush of flames reached up and took Garth Seckle in their grasp, burning him black while he still held fast to Peet’s leg. Peet never thought such screams could come from a man. When the death grip was at last relinquished, he gazed down into the inferno hoping to see Tiny Tim paying his final price, but the flames had swallowed the sight.
Peet bit down the pain in his sliced hand and ribs and pulled himself back up onto the catwalk. Around him the tallest of the flames engulfed steel. He charged through them for the shredding chute and clawed up its heavy tread. Peet emerged on the next level and burst into a sprint for the garage door. He didn’t stop when he got there. His impact tore the right side of it from its hinges and he was greeted by the sight of fire engines streaming into the complex.
He turned back then toward the hot orange glow climbing ever higher through the building, knowing the final explosion was just seconds away and the Ferryman was nowhere to be seen.
Leeds got off four futile shots before Kimberlain was able to force the pistol up and away from him, the struggle flaring anew. He stared into the madman’s rage-filled eyes and watched as they somehow turned bright red. It took him an instant to realize they had filled with the glow of a massive fire burst that rocketed the two of them through the stale scorched air. Kimberlain landed against heaps of fallen money bushels still clothed in their plastic wrappings, sight of Leeds stolen from him. Freed bills showered into the air, many blackened and already charring. Portions of the floor blew out to reveal an inferno raging in the second storage level below.
Only seconds left now before the entire building blew!
But where was Leeds?
The question was answered when his shape emerged staggering from a pile of loosed bills ten feet before the Ferryman. A half smile hung over his face. His trembling hand held fast to the pistol.
“It ends,” he said.
Kimberlain could do nothing but watch as his finger tightened its curl on the trigger.
“You’ve lost, too, Ferryman.”
Before Leeds could fire, though, massive segments of the ceiling and walls blew outward, tumbling the remaining stacks of money in the path of another fireball. The last the Ferryman saw of Leeds, he was standing statuelike amid the deadly money of his own making, his mad eyes fixed on the bills, as if welcoming them.
It ends… .
Yes, with the last huge bulk of the GS-7 soon to be ignited. But not before I get out, Kimberlain thought to himself.
The conveyor belt was still whole enough to allow for a rush back up it to the ground floor through the converging flames. The production area was a fiery shambles already. The machines Leeds had switched on were still whirling spasmodically, but gushed smoke instead of money. The Ferryman danced through the flames and debris until he reached the depository’s lobby.
He burst into a dash for the glass doors forming the main entrance. Just as he reached them, a deafening blast projected him forward like a cannon shot. Crashing through the glass felt strangely like a sudden fall into ice-packed snow, albeit with something blisteringly hot breathing down his back.
Impact came with stunning abruptness, and the black night closed over him.
Epilogue
KIMBERLAIN CAME AWAKE slowly to find a squat figure standing between his bed and the window.
“Who are you?” he managed.
“Jones will do,” the man returned, as he approached with a trench coat folded under his arm.
“Washington?”
“Close enough.”
Kimberlain’s return nod was equally slight. He knew Jones was a fixer, dispatched by the powers that be to clean up a mess the government didn’t want leaking out by any and all means available. His features were as nondescript as his job. Of medium height, he was slightly balding, his remaining hair was turning gray, and any muscle he might have had was a memory. When he was a yard from the bed, the Ferryman smelled drugstore after-shave.
“There are some matters that need to be cleared up,” Jones said with the interest of a man already late for his next appointment.”
“Where am I?” Kimberlain broke in. His throat was dry, and he had difficulty swallowing.
“Don’t you remember?”
“Pieces. That’s all.”
“You’re in a hospital. Better you don’t know the name or locale for now. This wasn’t the first hospital you were brought to. We had you moved after your ID came through.”
“I wasn’t carrying one.”
“Your fingerprints were sent to Washington. When your name came up, they sent me.”
“My wounds, how bad?”
“You were lucky. Collarbone needed surgery to repair. You suffered a severe concussion and broke your right ankle on impact with the ground. Assorted other bruises and lacerations. I can make you a list.”
“Don’t bother.” Kimberlain swallowed as best he could. Even blinking his eyes caused pain.
“The money was all destroyed,” the fixer went on. “The entire building was. No trace of Leeds either.”
“How did you know about—”
“A rather unusual man sent by you reached one of the typical agencies with a most unusual story. He told them everything, as you and he assumed it to be.”
Captain Seven, Kimberlain thought, following his orders when the Ferryman missed a planned contact.
“And did this agency believe him?”
“Would you?”
“No.”
“They didn’t either,” Jones said. “But when word of your presence here and of the depository’s destruction came in …”
Kimberlain tried to sit up and failed. “The money, some of it had already been sh
ipped to—”
“Impounded earlier today.”
“Checked?”
“In the process. I expect they’ll find just what you destroyed in Kansas. We can’t put a cloak on everything that happened. Probes are inevitable. The emphasis must be on minimalization.”
“Of course.”
“Toward that end, I have reached certain conclusions you need only confirm.” Jones looked him closely in the eye. “It has been determined that one Winston Peet, believed to have died during an escape from Graylock’s Sanitarium some years ago, was at the depository. Yes?”
Kimberlain wasn’t sure how to answer until he observed the expression on Jones’s face. “Yes,” he said then.
“It is our contention that his escape from The Locks was engineered by Andrew Harrison Leeds at that time and that Leeds has been harboring him, along with numerous others, ever since. Yes?”
“I suspect so.”
“And, lastly, we are led to believe that you were behind Peet’s final demise within the Kansas Depository building. Yes?”
“I was,” Kimberlain told him.
“Good,” Jones returned.
“Devil’s Claw,” the Ferryman said.
“My next subject. You should know a resort community being built there perished in a massive landslide two nights ago. There were no survivors. The coast guard is making regular patrols to make sure no one strays even close to the island. And you might also be interested to know T. Howard Briarwood has apparently disappeared once again. We do expect this time it will be rather prolonged.”
Kimberlain peered at Jones more closely but didn’t get much past the trench coat. “Kind of you to come all this way to provide me with an update.”
“Part of the cleanup process.”
“There’s a much bigger part you’ve got to undertake: finding all the monsters that came off the island to be stashed for judgment day. They’re out there, Mr. Jones, and they won’t be staying put for long.”
“I’m afraid we have no firm evidence of their existence.”
“Is it going to take one of them coming up and blowing your brains out to convince you they’re real?”
“We deal in realities, Mr. Kimberlain, not suppositions.”
“Of course,” the Ferryman concluded, “because to acknowledge their existence would mean having to marshal forces and admit all this happened. Can’t have that, can we?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. And yet …”
“Yet what?”
“If a private contractor wished to work on this matter, we would lend any support he desires. All he would have to do was ask.”
“That come from your superiors?”
“It comes from those who recognize your value and would like you to make use of it on our behalf.”
“We’ve been through this before, Jones.”
“Times change.”
“People don’t.”
Jones lifted his trench coat and jammed his arms through the sleeves.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said, and started for the door.
“Leaving guards in your place, Jones?”
The squat man stopped and turned back. “I’m not one of those people of yours. You’re free to go anytime you feel up to it. Walk out of here, run if you choose.”
Kimberlain settled back in silence.
“Think about my offer,” Jones said, and then he was gone.
When Kimberlain awoke next, darkness filled the room except for areas of light from the parking lot sneaking through the half-drawn blinds. A huge shape stood there gazing out into the blackness.
“Hello, Ferryman,” Peet greeted without turning.
Kimberlain smiled. “I didn’t know if you were alive, if you survived the—”
“A cleansing explosion, fire ironically an element of purification, rather than destruction.”
“In more ways than one.”
“The fire department could not quell the blaze. It burned itself out.”
“Again familiar …”
“I am free, Ferryman.”
“You were free before all this, Peet.”
The giant shook his massive bald head. Able to see a bit in the darkness now, Kimberlain made out the harsh red sheen on Peet’s exposed skin, the cracked and bubbled places on his face from close exposure to the flames. In addition, a bulge beneath his shirt indicated a self-bandaged wound. One of his hands was wrapped thickly with gauze as well.
“No, Ferryman, I was prisoner on the property you lent me. Leave it and I feared everything would go back to the way it was before. I was a prisoner of who I had been, of my own persona. I am free of that now.”
“Because you faced Leeds and stared him down, along with everything he represented?”
“Because I no longer have to run from the person I used to be. That person might still be out there, but he cannot catch me. I have at last learned how to emerge from unclean situations cleaner, to wash myself with dirty water.”
Kimberlain shifted his head through the pain. “Does this mean you won’t be using my cabin anymore?”
Peet looked at him deeply. “I must find my own woods, my own forest.”
“They’re still out there, Winston. Hundreds of them that Leeds sprung and then reconditioned.”
“But left their essences intact.”
“That was the point.”
“It will make them easier to find on my way.”
And then Kimberlain realized. “Give me some time to get healed and I’ll tag along.”
The giant shook his head. “Not this time, Ferryman.”
“I was starting to think we made a pretty good team.”
“We might yet again.”
“You’ll stay in touch.”
“It won’t be hard to figure out where I am.”
“What else brought you back here, Peet?”
“The wish that you would not consider trying to join me. The hope that you will at last walk away from the world that torments your soul.”
“I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“Certainly not if you don’t try.”
“Leeds wasn’t the first, and he won’t be the last. Who would stop them?”
“Themselves—eventually.”
“Not before plenty of people get hurt.”
“You can’t save them all, Ferryman.”
“Because I’m not responsible, right?”
“You are … for yourself.”
Everything was growing very clear, Kimberlain’s mind splitting the darkness. “Not always. My parents were killed because of what some force wanted to turn me into. My first mistake was to let it. I’m not going to make a second by letting that go to waste.”
“You pick up pieces that would be better left scattered,” Peet told him.
“And aren’t you about to do the same thing?”
“Yes, but for me there will be an end. I have found there can be closure. For you the cycle never stops or even lets up.”
“And there must be a reason for that, don’t you think? You see, Winston, I understand now that they tried to turn me into something that must have been there already or it couldn’t have come out. I am what I’m supposed to be, and I’m at peace with that, now more than ever. I really don’t want to change, Winston. I don’t know what I’d be like as somebody else.”
A slight smile spread across the giant’s face. “From that which you want to know and assess you must depart, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town, can you see how high its towers rise above the houses.”
“And do you ever come back?”
“Depends on what you find on the road.”
Kimberlain tried to raise himself up and failed. “Travel well, my friend.”
“You too, Ferryman.”
A Biography of Jon Land
Since his first book was published in 1983, Jon Land has written twenty-nine novels, seventeen of which have appeared on national bestseller lists. H
e began writing technothrillers before Tom Clancy put them in vogue, and his strong prose, easy characterization, and commitment to technical accuracy have made him a pillar of the genre.
Land spent his college years at Brown University, where he convinced the faculty to let him attempt writing a thriller as his senior honors thesis. Four years later, his first novel, The Doomsday Spiral, appeared in print. In the last years of the Cold War, he found a place writing chilling portrayals of threats to the United States, and of the men and women who operated undercover and outside the law to maintain US security. His most successful of those novels were the nine starring Blaine McCracken, a rogue CIA agent and former Green Beret with the skills of James Bond but none of the Englishman’s tact.
In 1998 Land published the first novel in his Ben and Danielle series, comprised of fast-paced thrillers whose heroes, a Detroit cop and an Israeli detective, work together to protect the Holy Land, falling in love in the process. He has written seven of these so far. The most recent, The Last Prophecy, was released in 2004.
RT Book Reviews honored Land with a special prize for pioneering genre fiction, and his short story “Killing Time” was shortlisted for the 2010 Dagger Award for best short fiction and included in 2010’s The Best American Mystery Stories. He is also the author of the Caitlin Strong series, starring the eponymous Texas Ranger, a female character in a genre that Land has said has too few. The second book in the Caitlin Strong series, Strong Justice (2010), was named a Top Thriller of the Year by Library Journal and runner-up for Best Novel of the Year by the New England Book Festival. His first nonfiction book, Betrayal, written with Robert Fitzpatrick, tells the behind-the-scenes story of a deputy FBI chief attempting to bring down Boston crime lord Whitey Bulger, and was published to acclaim in 2011. The Blaine McCracken novel Pandora’s Temple won the 2013 International Book Award for Best Thriller/Adventure, and was nominated for a 2013 Thriller Award for Best E-Book Original Novel.
