End Time (26 page)

So the need for sleep reasserted itself as the Gulfstream cruised above the skin of the world. God, what he'd give for a year-long dreamabout. He'd taken long rests in other times, after great exertions, a rain of brimstone or plague of locusts. A dozen years here, a century there, even millennia, awakening refreshed and restored. Immortal hibernation. A Rip Van Winkle nap: snoring away and opening his eyes only to discover how the world had delightfully changed in his absence. His dreams were always about the past. He felt his eyes shutting, his breath slow and steady, as the present dream brought him back, a favorite, an oldie but a goodie: medieval Hamelin.

The bare monastery cell: the wooden cot, the rope sling, the rag-stuffed mattress, a cross on the wall, and the bolted door; a table for a candle and The Book. And even if there were moments of bright sun and glorious days in that period they called the Dark Ages, the light in his room always was shadowed, damp, a mere slit in the wall to let in air. The mortar was slightly cracked in the dank stone walls, and when it rained a rivulet of water snaked by his head as he lay on his cot, thence to the floor and along the wall and out a corner. Sort of like a subterranean river that emerges from stone, flows on for a spell, then disappears into the corner of a cave.

In the winter, icicles came down from the wooden roof where it met the stone; in summer, a hundred flies found their place to breed. Brother Hansel told Piper that his parents had sold him to this place, to make him a monk, to take him off their hands. The last of thirteen children, never enough to go around—and Brother Hansel told young novice P what a lucky fellow he was to come into the cloister. But these were just old wives' tales; for the life of him, Piper could never remember a childhood. It seemed to him he'd always been a man.

Outside the monastery walls the world cried under the fists of petty kings and their petty squabbles, but within the safe walls, life was quiet. Austere, pious. Piper particularly enjoyed the liturgy as chanted by his friend Vans, while the brothers sat at supper, quietly eating. They called him Vans, with a double meaning,
vantze,
the Louse, mostly because Brother Vans was so short and pale. Vans' charming voice filled the long cold hall:

Thou that takest away the sins of the world,

      Have mercy upon us.

Thou that takest away the sins of the world,

      Receive our prayer—

Everyone liked Brother Vans; he was popular and often available. No stranger to the secluded ground under the bushes by the high stone wall.…

The
Twilight Zone
phone rang, rudely ripping Brother Piper away from the charming and easy pious Brother Vans. The Kit-Cat clock tick-tocked away in its own banquette, strapped into a child safety seat; the time read fourteen minutes to noon,
tock-tock-tock
. Outside the sun was shining. God, he'd only been asleep a couple of hours.

Damn that
Zone
phone. Good for ordering pizzas in New York and keeping tabs on the company's underlings, but he never gave out the call-back number. He groggily stared at the toy phone from the deep cushioned seat in the Gulfstream's cabin. Mr. Piper had even taken the black phone receiver off the hook as a precaution. But it didn't help; the damn phone rang again, insistent. He could get people to think what he wanted, so why in damn hell couldn't he get a damn toy phone to behave and stop ringing at all hours for no reason? Some entities just had a mind of their own.

In another banquette the boy quietly tapped the keys of his laptop; music bumped out of the speaker, a Johnny Cash song: “I've Been Everywhere.” The lad tweaking it on his own now:

Can't say I really cared, man

Stabbed you in the back, man

Can't say I really cared.

If he put his mind to it, he'd rewrite every copy in existence. No, not today.

The boy looked up from his laptop and turned down the gravelly voice of the Man in Black, then reached across his banquette, picked up the
Zone
phone receiver, and returned it to its cradle, hanging up on the call. Disconnected, the ringing stopped. The Kid had no use for the phone; he could get everything he needed from the computer. Gas station credit card charges, lodge and dining charges, police arrest records, weather reports, data streams of every variety were open to him. His eyes went back to the laptop screen, where he tracked the company's operatives.

“Well, which do you want first, the good news or the bad?” the boy asked.

Mr. Piper rubbed his temples and tried to concentrate. You wouldn't have recognized the lad from that first day in the dirty T-shirt. No longer a street punk; the pressed khakis, the button-down Oxford shirt—he could have been right out of Tabor Academy in Marion, Massachusetts, with one of those blue blazers and the school coat of arms.

As always, Mr. P. wanted the bad news first:

“Location of surviving female?”

Competent as any corporate VP, the sharply turned-out preppy reeled off what he knew so far in a likeable, nonjudgmental kind of way:

“Location unknown. We are pursuing relevant leads. In Los Angeles County, Inspector Frederick delayed due to arrest of an associate on the charge of solicitation.”

The long, gaunt man snorted in contempt.

“Solicitation?”

The lad's nimble hands stretched from the clean cuffs of his button-down shirt; he clicked a few keys on the laptop, “Broderick Fallows. Arrested twenty-four hours ago by local Los Angeles PD in the company of Inspector Frederick. Broderick Fallows doing business as Lady Fallows; film director, transgendered part-time soliciting. Inspector Frederick briefly held and released on his own recognizance. We've rerouted Frederick to Las Cruces, New Mexico, for Malvedos interview, additional lead, possible shortcut to Chen girl.”

A pause; another question was coming:

“Bioengineer Webster specializing in recombinant DNA? Wayward brother of Big Sis, Gimp Saloon broad?”

The lad paused for a moment, touched the keys, checking another database on the laptop. A tiny sheen of sweat had appeared on his upper lip, and he wiped it off on his shirtsleeve, more in excitement than any kind of fear. He really liked being of use.

“Bioengineer Webster location confirmed, en route to Dugway recovery with planned return to the
π
r
2
facility, Hillsboro, Ohio.”

Again, the long pause. Another question:

“Wild 3 touchdown site?”

A few more clicks of the laptop:

“Recovery delayed due to inclement weather. Recovery Team standing by at the edge of the low-pressure area. The National Weather Service is calling it an anomalous event. No sign of abatement.”

An even longer pause. Piper felt the snow falling from the sky in faraway Utah, felt his will melding cloud and moisture and ice and wind. That was enough to give anyone a headache. His voice came again, out of the depths of his head, and with a touch of satisfaction, if the sound of ground glass underfoot might sound pleasing:

“Carry on.”

The boy turned up the sound on Johnny Cash, popped a fizzy tab of Dalekto, and clicked back to his studies, instantly immersed in the rise of Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, the regicide of Charles the First, and the nearly genocidal invasion of Ireland and the Siege of Wexford:

While Cromwell himself was trying to negotiate surrender terms, some of his soldiers broke into the town, killed 2,000 Irish troops, up to 1,500 civilians, and burned much of the town—

The young lad looked up from the laptop screen and toward Piper. “Were you in Ireland?” He didn't have to tell Mr. P. which century; their minds seemed to work like that. No need for long explanations.

“Aye, boyo—both sides. After the Lord Protector was dead and buried, I dug him up for the Royalists and beheaded him for good measure. Never overlook the benefit of cheap theatrics when attempting to please a crowd.”

The boy went back to the screen; he was clicking through European history at a hurtling gallop: four seconds on this century, five seconds on the next. In addition to learning big words, his ability to access and absorb was becoming prodigious. He was already up to mid-twentieth century. He paused. “But Stalingrad did not go as planned, did it?”

Mr. P. sighed. “Oh, we went to town all right. Not a stone standing. But then Der Mustache ordered Field Marshal Paulus to commit suicide in disgrace. As I recall the good general remarked, ‘I have no intention of shooting myself for an Austrian corporal.' Never underestimate the self-regard of the aristocratic mind, boyo. Snobbery is the last refuge of defeat.”

Then after a moment, he lay back and closed his eyes again.

“Just make sure our open-fly Keystone Cop gets to Las Cruces.”

 

14

Low-Pressure Center

June turned into July.

Most of the world went about its daily business in blissful ignorance.

Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Once again, the wooden clunky beads rattled apart in Senora Malvedos' inner sanctum; she stared at the weasel-faced man coming in from the parlor. The weasel owned the face of ugliness and brought with him many terrible things. The hand on the back of her neck wasn't a mild touch, but a vise-grip. Two steel pincers with ridges squeezing tighter and tighter. This walking waste of human skin in his cheap suit had
bad cop
radiating from every pore. Second-rate navy blue Arnold Palmer sports coat and Dockers slacks; the sports coat riding around his shoulders, the khaki slacks board stiff as if pressed with starch. Under the jacket he carried a gun and didn't care if the bunching showed.

Every time the man exhaled, the reek of halitosis carried on it the remnants of some black deed. One of the few men Senora Malvedos had ever seen who wasn't keeping a secret or trying to confess. The stench of his own recent past flowed across the table:

The hatchet-faced policeman sat in an unmarked car at night; across the street in a Holiday Inn parking lot a lady motorcycle cop and the sad man with the lost daughter got into the back of a limousine. Inspector Frederick jammed an earplug into his ear. He was listening to a conversation inside the idling limo, a wiretap on some kind of criminal boss named Nicky. A black man's deep voice explaining: “… they call him the Magician. Things get around. They say he's running some kind of chop-shop, snuff market; they call it the Harrow House. I mean, it may not even be a real place, a real house. You pay and you play. Single-payer system right?”

The vision shifted, and Senora Malvedos saw something else.
It felt like the same night. The inspector was addressing half a dozen kids outside a single-story house in some Los Angeles neighborhood. “Make it quick. They either know or they don't. Do the lips. And don't forget to vacuum on your way out.”

Suddenly the woman saw inside the house:
The kids ran in like wild animals surprising Mama and her two sons on the couch. Hissed questions, “Where is she? Where?” No answer, just fear. Arms held down big Mama; plastic bags came out, over the heads, gasping, choking, turning blue while Mama and her two boys writhed on the couch and the TV sang. The bodies stopped struggling. Then the knives did the mouths like they were told, zippity-zip! And someone ran the vacuum over the wall-to-wall carpet as the wild boys quietly backed out of the house snickering over their trophy lips.

Senora Malvedos touched a kerchief to her face, but nothing pushed aside what she saw.
The dark upper floor of a warehouse, a bright desk lamp illuminating a large body strapped to a metal spring cot. Nicky the Banka-Gangsta's three-thousand-dollar Armani suit fell in tatters around his body; blood ran down the coiled springs of the cot like rain dripping from a roof. Only the soft sound of the drug dealer's ragged breathing. Alive, yes, but missing his lips. All the missing lips from around LA would keep the department chasing its tail for months.… Then the hatchet face came into the light, his voice sad and measured: “Nicky … Nicky … we had a good thing going.” Heavy with regret: “I'm gonna miss it. And I know you're not holding out on me—no reason to. But frankly the Magician needed a lot more from you this time.” A large butcher knife glinted in the light. “In any event, on behalf of the Los Angeles Police Department, I want to thank you for your cooperation.”

Senora Malvedos stared at the kerchief, darkened with moisture from her face. Another bit from Los Angeles crossed her eyes, and the word
Inexplicable
jumped into her mind. A movie title? But the vision was clear enough:
Later that same night … The hatchet-faced cop sat in his unmarked car in some quiet alley. He'd picked up a hooker; she sat in the passenger seat, leaning over the center armrest, her face down in his lap. The shiny blond hair moved back and forth. While the radio played old Donna Summer, Inspector Frederick mouthing new words, “He works hard for the money / so hard on it honey.”

Then suddenly an LAPD patrol car flipped on its bubbled lights, flashing everywhere in red and blue and white. The single bark of a siren. A metallic voice ordered, “Stay in the car, please.”

“Quit it!” Frederick the bad copper yanked the blond head off his lap. And he snarled, “Get outta here! Go find an ant colony, bitch. Get lost!” But it was too late for that; the uniforms from the black-and-white were already at the driver and passenger windows. To Inspector Frederick: “License and registration, please?” To the blond ladyboy fixing her makeup from a Mary Kay Compact Pro: “Miss, you can do that later. Hands where I can see them, please.” Then the uniform at the passenger window recognized the lady. He chuckled dryly. “Again, Mr. Fallows?”

The police inspector's recent past floated away to nothing. Senora Malvedos stared at her hands on the green velvet of the table; one was twitching.