“My product can heal even the worst injury. Nicolai, please show our guests.”
Tesslovich loosened his collar, revealing the wide scar that circled his neck.
“Nicolai was beheaded by a Raptor. Emergency medical intervention was obviously needed, but both his body and head were kept alive by my little machines until they could be reunited."
Zoven and Nob, got up to look at the back of Tesslovich’s neck. Zoven, in strapless, midnight blue Valentino, traced the scar with one long, red fingernail causing Tesslovich to leer at her over his shoulder.
“And your fighters?”
“A prototype for an army of slaves and soldiers--human and demon. A renewable asset that can take great punishment, yet heal to work or fight another day. Their will and actions can be controlled by wireless signals from a central, or even portable, source. With this technology, the Eight can control the human race or annihilate it as you will.”
Nob smiled. “If we destroy them, what will we play with when we’re bored?”
“Besides," Yellow horned Zoven added, "Destruction of the human race has been tried before. Several times. Humans are like cockroaches; they suffer, they die, but they always find some way to survive.”
“What I offer is not magic.” Zaki told them. “It’s science. Hard, cold, technological virtuosity.”
“And the secret to making this science?” Bezla asked.
“Remains mine, and mine alone.”
“And in return for your--virtuosity?”
“I want my own house within the Families and the wealth to run it. I will keep the technology and continue to improve it until it is everything you wish it to be.”
“What about your own scientists? The ones who produced the machines. They must know how these things are made. Why don’t we just buy one or two of them? After all, we are obscenely rich, we could easily provide them with all the equipment they need to duplicate your technology for ourselves.”
Zaki had perched his elbows on the arms of his chair and entwined his long fingers during this discussion. He threw his hands apart.
“Too late.” He said.
“Sorry?”
“It’s too late to do that. I’m not a fool, you know. All my scientists are dead, or soon will be. The celebratory lunch I just gave them was poisoned. Death is so much cheaper and more reliable than a pension plan or non-competition agreement. And I really don’t have a use for them anymore. All I need now are a few assistants who don’t have the whole picture to help me move my equipment and set up somewhere else.”
Alameil gave him a predatory smile. It was too bad he couldn’t trust getting closer to her. She liked her little hobby far too much.
“Besides, you wouldn’t want to do my work. It would be tedious and boring for Lords of your station. Just pay me for the results and provide me your protection from my enemies.”
“You have enemies?” Bezla asked, amused by his own question.
“My Lord,” Zaki answered him. “Don’t we all? I’m offering you the ultimate in protection against them: the antidote to death itself.”
"And families outside of The Eight?"
"Have also been invited to bid. The house that wins controls my product, and perhaps, in time, the entire world.” Zaki smiled. “Who can say where this will go, the possibilities are--endless."
"We could kill you right now, and take your data." Nob told him.
Zaki shrugged. "It's encrypted. It will self destruct if tampered with.” He waved a hand as if dismissing the idea as absurd. “The Lords of Eight are many things, but none of you are fools."
He stood up. "Nicolai will escort you to the arena. Your private Skybox is well supplied with food, drink and other potential amusements. There will be entertainment and a fascinating presentation. Your bids, if you wish, can be confidential."
"Have you met with the other families the same way you've met with us?" Nob's voice was harsh.
"Of course," Zaki said. "But few others have the vision and resources of The Eight."
As the demons filed out of the board room Bezla turned back to Zaki. "I'm afraid I cannot stay," he said. "I am old enough to have wearied of bread and circuses, and I have other business that needs my attention."
"You aren't concerned about what the other lords will do in your absence?”
"The family has my vote. Each one of us is as ruthless as the next but we recognize when something is of mutual advantage.” Bezla gave Zaki a small smile. “I have no worries about who will ultimately win.”
A few moments later, from the window of the board room, Zaki watched as The Eight’s helicopter took off over the lake.
Well done, Zaki thought. Bezla was Patriarch of The Lords of Eight. His departure was just a ploy to make The Eight appear less interested in the nanotechnology than they actually were. Zaki shrugged. He'd watched their eyes as he explained what his little beasts could do. There was no price they wouldn't pay to have control of his invention. And, devious as they all might be, not one of them had any idea that Zaki would always retain ultimate control over what they did with it.
- 12 -
“The helicopter is taking off,” one of the techs informed Cassius. He turned to another screen. “Zaki has entered the arena.”
Cassius looked at the second screen, one of three mounted in the front of the first car of the train. The ultimate showman, Zaki was rising out of the arena floor on a round platform which stopped when he was six feet above the lowest row of seats. He had a microphone in his hand. Huge screens covering all four walls of the arena magnified him until he was a giant, god-like replicant of the puny humanoid on the platform below.
“Turn up the sound,” Cassius said. He knew this image would be on the screens in all cars of the train.
“ . . . dies and gentlemen.” Zaki was saying. “I hope you have enjoyed the bouts of combat, feats of strength, victory and defeat you have seen here today. But what you have seen is merely the beginning. . . ”
“How big is his audience, would you say?” Cassius asked the tech.
“Two hundred or so in seats,” the tech said. “Most of the ones on foot are security or catering staff. But there’s also the Skyboxes. We can’t tell how many have demons in them.”
“The ones on the floor are probably small fry. Minor families, retainers, pilot fish. The power families are in the Skyboxes with their body guards. That adds maybe thirty more. And we don’t know who’s in the other buildings. They could be another source of resistance.” Cassius frowned. “Who got on the copter?”
“Some violet colored dude in a fancy robe. He was by himself.”
“Odd. But we can worry about that later. With the copter gone it gives them one less means of escape.”
* * *
“ . . . ground breaking technology,” Zaki continued. Giant nanobots started to crawl across the screens.“. . . powered by self replicating bacteria, their life span can be calculated in hundreds of years, possibly millennia.”
“Poisonous bacteria, you bastard!” Cassius said. He looked behind him. The train car was full of rag tag, but well-armed Deepers. He adjusted his wireless head set. “Everybody on board?” he asked. Captain Greggs gave him a thumbs up.
“Mr. McCullen?” The engineer was in a closed compartment at the head of the train. “Let’s roll this train. If Mr. Bishop and the Raptor are on the secondary platform we will stop and board them.”
“ . . .what I have to offer goes beyond immortality. It promises enhanced strength, faster reflexes, and most important of all, regeneration at the brink of death, and beyond.”
The train slowed to a stop. The doors of the first car slid open. A shaky, but determined looking Bishop, flanked by Ariel and Dingo, was waiting on the platform. Behind them, a giant mound of flesh was giving off a sound like an asthmatic water buffalo with a head cold.
“You found him!” Cassius said, meaning Bishop.
“Piece of cake.” Ariel stayed on the platform while Bishop and Di
ngo stepped on board. “I’m going to hook up with the Dogs. We’ll come in through the front gate or over the wall. Try to keep your fight inside the buildings. From the amount of ‘goyle activity we’ve seen lately, Zaki must have a roost on the property. If somebody lets them loose, that will be just one more thing to contend with.”
“Let us know when you hit the gate.”
Ariel tapped her headset. “Good luck,” she said. The train doors slid shut.
* * *
“You need a medic, Mr. Bishop?” Cassius asked.
Bishop knew he looked like someone who been thoroughly worked over, twice. “Not yet.” He thumbed the cap off one of the bottles in his pocket and threw down another pill. “I’d take an ice pack if you have one handy.”
Over Cassius’ shoulder Bishop could see the video feed from the arena. Two brightly painted slant boards were being set up, facing each other on the arena floor. They had straps attached to them in a configuration that implied something with four limbs would soon be restrained at ankles, wrists and waist. It reminded Bishop of the set up for a knife throwing act in the circus, and that thought led to one that was even worse.
Zaki’s voice continued. “In a short while, my associate and I will show you irrefutable proof that what I’m offering you actually works.”
A little man in a striped suit stepped onto the arena floor and began to check over the boards and straps.
“See that guy in the ugly suit?” Bishop asked no one in particular. “I want him really, really bad.”
- 13 -
As the train pulled away from the Tesslovich platform, heavy steel shutters slid down over windows and doors, hopefully sealing the cars off from the lethal consequences of the steam trap and any microwaves aimed at the train. Ariel knew that Cassius had already activated a continuous loop for the security cameras showing an empty track. The train would take about twenty minutes to reach Zaki’s estate. She had to hurry.
The fastest way was back up the stairs, through the first floor of the mansion and out the back door. If she went airborne from the alley there was less chance of being seen leaving the ground. Ariel’s feet pounded up the stairs and across the hall tiles. She skidded around a corner into the dining room, where a display of old weapons covered the walls. Several were missing, leaving faint outlines behind.
Damn! she thought. Some of the demons were armed, and by the look of other objects left behind, they had taken all the Angel Slayers. Were they expecting trouble? And why would they expect it to be the kind of trouble that called for Angel Slayers? She couldn’t worry about that now. There were two particularly nice spears mounted on either side of the door to the kitchen. She pulled them off the wall and shouldered her way through the swinging door into a room full of bright white tile and shiny stainless steel. A walk-in refrigerator with glass doors took up almost one whole wall of the industrial size kitchen. Ariel didn’t want to speculate on what kind of animals the sides of meat hanging inside might have come from. Because she was looking at the refrigerator, she narrowly avoided stepping on a body surrounded by crushed condiment containers, lying on the floor near the sink. It was dressed in checked pants and a starched white chef’s tunic, but the limbs and accessories protruding from the openings in the uniform weren’t attached to anything a gourmet was likely to see preparing the sauce at his favorite bistro. The demon looked totally dead with a dash of sea salt, just the way Ariel liked them.
The kitchen door opened into a small backyard surrounded by a stone wall. Two small gargoyles faced outward, perched on posts on either side of the alley gate. Ariel leaped into the air, unfurling her wings with a loud snap. The gargoyles hadn’t expected a threat from inside the wall and their reaction time was slow. As they began to pivot on their posts, Ariel flipped the spears so they were parallel to the ground and rammed them straight through the ‘goyles leathery torsos. The spear points exited their bellies with a crunchy sounding splot.
“The shish-kebob is particularly good tonight,” she told the dead ‘goyles, as she shook their bodies off the spears into the yard where they wouldn’t be seen by a passing neighbor. If the Deeper and werewolf attacks were going to happen simultaneously, she had to get to the Dog’s campground as quickly as possible.
She launched herself into the sky, hoping that multiple sightings of a giant bird wouldn’t make the seven o’clock news. Her experience told her that if someone saw her they were likely to dismiss it as some kind of urban hallucination.
* * *
When she reached the campground on the lake, Ariel had no trouble identifying which section of sand and beach grass had been claimed by the Dogs. The parking lot was lined with Harleys, and riders in leathers and sleeveless jean jackets with pack colors were perched on wooden tables and benches in the group picnic area. A few barbeques were still smoldering, the remains of hot dog lunches and dead six packs were stuffed into overflowing garbage drums near the small pavilion and rest rooms. The Dogs were a mixed group: both men and women riders with passengers of either sex. Once changed into wolves, sex wouldn’t matter; they’d all be equally scary. Ariel could see weapons tucked here and there in waist bands and shoulder rigs, but the bulk of firepower was under the tarp of Juke’s old pickup truck. Tomas was talking to a couple of long haired accountants, but stopped when Ariel dropped down onto the sand. She tossed him one of the spears.
“Saddle up,” she said. “We have a gate to crash.”
* * *
“Steam trap fifteen seconds. Best move to the center of the car.”
It took Bishop longer than anyone else to get up off the bench and grab one of the poles provided for standing passengers. Although he could feel the painkillers and the speed working out the terms of their agreement inside his body, sudden moves and deep breathing still made him grit his teeth. I can do this, he thought, wrapping his fingers around the cool metal pole. Then he heard the steam come on. It sounded like multiple explosions of air under extreme pressure. They hit the old train car with enough force that it began to rock from side to side. Wisps of wet heat forced their way through cracks between the retro-fitted steel plates, causing boiling condensation to flow in streams down the inside of the doors and windows to form puddles on the floor. His fellow passengers squeezed closer together trying to keep their feet from contact with the steaming puddles.
“Everybody okay?” Cassius listened to his headphone for a few seconds. “Minor burns,” he announced. “We’re through.”
The secondary screen switched to an aerial view, then went thermal. Bishop could see bright red, yellow and orange bodies moving around the buildings, their appendages were visible as long as they didn’t stand too close together. Bodies in the arena gave off a huge thermal signature that coalesced into a giant, pulsating red blob surrounding four smaller blobs in the middle. Zaki’s house had only a few blobs inside. The bodies moving about the grounds could only be random security on patrol, and there were five bodies on the subway platform at the end of the tunnel. There were three blobs at the front gate.
Greggs stood at Cassius’ shoulder, his eyes moving from building to building. “A Team will move down the tunnel on foot and take the station,” he began. Then, “What’s this?”
A large room in the lab building showed multiple immobile green blobs in rag doll poses. Some were lying flat out, probably on the floor.
“Maybe unconscious, probably dead,” Cassius told him. “Green means their body temperature is lower than normal. We’ll have to check it out.”
On the first screen, two young, shirtless men had been strapped to the slant boards. One had pale blue skin and two small horns right above his hairline, the other looked human. The little man in the ugly suit had removed his jacket, displaying deep sweat stains under his arms and a set of gaudy green sleeve garters. The boards started to spin in an anti-clockwise direction. He took a stance about fifteen feet from the board holding the blue demon and started to throw knives at him. His objective wasn’t to miss his targe
t.
A knife sunk into the young demon’s body just below his collarbone, another hit his abdomen dead center. The demon writhed with each impact, then suddenly went slack, head lolling to the side. Streams of yellow blood ran down his chest and belly. The Great Constantini strutted over and wrenched each knife out, displaying the wounds to the crowd. The big screens made them look cavernous in size. Within a moment the blood flow stopped and the lips of the wounds quivered and started to seal themselves. The right side of the huge screens began to display eight, then nine, then ten digit numbers.
The car went silent. “Jesus!” Somebody said. “They’re bidding on what’s keeping that guy alive!”
“Twenty seconds to drop point,” Engineer McCullen’s voice echoed through the car. “Prepare to hit the tracks Mr. Greggs. I’ll give you four minutes lead time then I’m parking this train on Zaki’s bumper.”
- 14 -
Ariel and Tomas led the phalanx of biker Dogs from the air. Directly under them was Juke’s pick-up truck, loaded with artillery and the jeans, boots and helmets of semi-naked werewolves on Harleys. Some Dogs had kept their colors, others wore Kevlar vests. Because riding a bike took a mostly human shape, the Dogs hadn’t totally transformed. Most were hanging somewhere in the zone between not quite human and mostly wolf. The partial transformation had elongated their bodies, causing arms and torsos to hunch over the handlebars. Their faces were all snout and fangs, their hands and feet like weapons, tipped with claws.
Ariel signaled that she and Tomas were going on ahead. She knew from the drive-by with Bishop that the gate was flanked by pillars with one large gargoyle on each post. A security booth just inside contained at least one uniformed guard. If the she and Tomas couldn’t take out the ‘goyles, and open the gate before an alarm could be raised, Juke would have to blow it open with a grenade and that would not only alert Zaki that an invasion was on the way, but create one more easy escape route for the demons inside.
Raptor: Urban Fantasy Noir Page 31
