End Time (61 page)

But Kid's dark countenance was like a hood over the lad's mind and thoughts, shutting the tall man out. No matter. He was better off than when Piper had taken him away from that crappy apartment on Avenue A. Let him sulk. He'd come around eventually. All Quiet on the Kiddie Front.

Back to business. The cavalry had arrived.

There were soldiers down in the street with hermetic coffins—hazmat body-transport canisters—who
really
wanted to collect Mr. P.'s children. The gentlemen in camouflage praying they weren't too late to snatch Lila's most excellent genetic cell structure and restore humanity as the exalted rulers of planet Earth before the cockroaches took over. The gaunt man's hand clenched the red lava lamp on his desk. The molten wax within slowly roiled under his touch, bubbling to life like real lava. The more excited he got the faster it seemed to bubble.

What to do with the Special Locator Team downstairs?

Use them or abuse them?

Should he get them to blast each other to smithereens? Or get them to help bring Lila Chen, the little scamp, and Kid to the Ant Colony for their body-fluid donations in those nice, clean, hermetically sealed plastic canisters? They could all chopper over to LaGuardia airport and hop on Piper Holdings' Gulfstream jet.

Decisions, decisions. Why not both? Use them
and
abuse them.

*   *   *

Lila and Little Maria turned from the window in their San Remo bedroom. Not much left to look at down in the street. The soldiers stood idly by their barbed-wire cordon, not even talking amongst themselves; the helicopter blades were limp and drooping. A kind of icy rain began to fall, glittering under the streetlights, and the sound of
tick-tick-tick
echoed in the canyons of the buildings. Their would-be rescuers, the
nice people
in their SUVs, had driven off, leaving one man dead on the pavement. Maria remembered him. The quiet, sad man from Madame Malvedos' parlor who'd come looking for his daughter—a daughter he would only find on a slab.

Kid sat on the bed under the bunny hutch mural and stared into his iPad with hooded, brooding eyes. He'd seen it all go down outside. And he'd begun to realize that since the moment he met Mr. P., he'd been dying by inches.

Everything the young man did since he left the ratty apartment in Alphabet City—before he possessed a mind, before he knew right from wrong, before he learned
analogies and the core of cognition—
had finally come full circle. If chaos came on smaller wings, fate came on greater ones: the rainbow junk he sold through his skycaps, the digital havoc he wreaked from coast to coast. Now one of those who'd come to rescue them, a selfless stranger, lay in the street. Shot dead for all his effort.

Kid's breath came in short gasps; his hands gripping the electronic tablet. He felt the anger in him, like an exoskeleton protecting his soft insides. A cloak of invisibility for him and the girls from Mr. P.'s inquisitive mind. Kid's anger grew. God, how eagerly he followed the Pied Piper down every dark path without question. And he'd kept on following even as he learned better.
Too late to set it right, change it now?

Not too late, as long as Mr. P. was the last to know. After mastering so many of Piper's tricks, Kid had mastered a poker face too. Carefully, he donned it like a mask, covering the inside and letting nothing show, shielding his mind from the man in the study.

For the last time he recalled his mother and her boyfriend as they used to be: Mama shuffling around the Alphabet City apartment, tugging at her dingy T-shirt and Dimples bored of her, coming into the kitchen ready for Room Time while the Kit-Cat clock wagged its tail—

Mr. P.'s voice echoed in his head.
Why'd you ever want to leave that swell apartment? Oh yeah, I remember—Room Time. No more of that, right?

“No more Room Time,” Kid agreed softly. The iPad began to flicker in transmission, some new atrocity. Lila and Little Maria stood with their backs to the window, not daring to move.

“You don't have to watch any more of that,” Lila whispered.

Kid looked at her with haunted eyes. He swallowed hard and quietly shut it off. For a few seconds he stared through the connecting bathroom into his bedroom with the Kit-Cat clock, the room he never slept in. When the clock refused to stop ticking, even with the plug out, Kid had cracked its face. Periodically the damn clock still came to life, going
click-clack-click
as if to defy him, like it used to in the dirty kitchen back on Avenue A. To think once upon a time he
actually asked
Mr. P. to buy him one of his own.

For a few more moments, the young man thought about all the stuff he had bought: extra wristwatches, a samurai sword, a crossbow with real pointed darts. He used the crossbow once on the back of his door and never picked it up again. Now all his toys and clothes repelled him: the preppy blazers, the dozen pairs of khakis, the three-yard basketball shoes, and all that really cool hip-hop gear. All because he'd started out hiding under the kitchen sink hoping to escape the next Room Time. So when the Pied Piper took him away from the rotten apartment, fed him lobster and fancy cake in a hotel, that made everything okay? What had he really gotten out of it? Baubles. Bribes. And the merest beginnings of an education. The barest inkling of the difference between right and wrong.

But other than that—

Not a damn thing.

In two strides, Kid bolted through the connecting bathroom, slammed open his window, and started tossing the stuff outside. All the toys, all the trinkets. Suddenly the Kit-Cat clock began to
click-clack
loudly.

Kid grabbed it off the wall and pitched it out the window with all the rest. The brittle plastic clock clattered noisily to the pavement, making a couple of troopers look in the shattered clock's direction as the clothes fluttered down. A pair of trousers tried to run away by themselves on a gust of wind, but snagged onto the barbed-wire barricade. A soldier removed the pants and slung them under a grimy standpipe.

That's what I've become,
Kid realized, a pair of trousers on a wire. Shapeless legs that Mr. Piper allowed to walk around for a while until the gaunt man decided to change his pants.

Kid flopped back down on Lila's bed. He rested his head against the bunny hutch mural. In a lower corner of the picture, under a clump of grass, two mice in a cozy hole shared a meal at a tiny table. He reached out to touch the two little mice, safe and snug in their little hole. Oh, if only he could go there, live forever with Flopsy, Mopsy, and Peter Cottontail. Not a perfect life, but a better one: where no one was hurt and no one got scared too seriously.

Kid stared at Lila, and then at Maria, his eyes growing dark and bitter. Maria clasped Lila Chen's hand.

“I'm just as smart as either of you,” Kid said. “I'm just not biologically divine or psychic. So how come you got the extra jizz? What makes you Hottentots so hot? Whaddah you got that I don't got?”

His eyes grew darker.

“I'm surprised I haven't made you suck my dick yet, Lila. I could do you in the lower bunk while the little one sits up top. Or get her down to jump on Mr. Baldy while you help. I knew guys in the 'hood that did their wives and sisters together all the time, just like they do in swanky Lincoln Park, bohunk Cheesehead towns in Wisconsin, and places you never heard of in West Virginia.”

The ugly words hung in the air.

He seemed to relish the thought for a moment; but the pleasure faded like it had never been. Over time he'd grown bigger inside than that. Less cruel. More merciful. Stronger. Maybe beating Dalekto had done it, or just being with the girls—under their benevolent spell. They'd had a good influence on him. Like a lovely perfume that never wore off.

When Lila said nothing, Kid knew there wouldn't be an answer. Neither Lila nor the little girl spoke, but a glint came to their eyes, as if they knew something. That Kid was not half as bad as he thought; that he had chosen the right side ages ago and just didn't quite know yet. Kid felt the tiny angel and tiny devil sitting on his shoulders again:

Devil Kid:
Where you gonna run to, Spanky?

Angel Kid:
Don't listen. Just leave.

Suddenly, Kid shooed them away like pesky flies. Devil Kid fell from his shoulder with a squeak of dismay and a puff of smoke. Angel Kid smiled and rose to heaven on the thrum of a harp. Kid's mind hung in the balance. There was a decision to be made. A choice. That's all that was left to do; exercise a moment of free will.

“I want to go,” Maria begged. “Can we go, Kid? Can we go now?”

The little scamp's eyes pleaded with the older girl to help.

“It's up to Kid,” Lila said to Maria. Not wanting to force the young man. Anything but that. He'd been forced his whole life. Tricked and bullied at every turn. And Lila wasn't going to do it this time, not now—not ever again.

Repeating softly, “It's up to Kid.”

*   *   *

Mr. P. had finally come to that crucial decision. After peoplekind slaughtered each other and went to ground, he fancied remaking the world
in his own image
. This, then, the critical, missing aspect of the plan.

The blush on the rose, what made it perfect.

How truly inspired.

Reseed, rebreed, inbreed mankind using his pretty poppet pods: the Chen girl, Little Maria, and the Kid. Use them as Human Zero, Adam and Eve, plus an Evelyn for good measure. That meant going down the worm crawl at the Hillsboro Whiteside Meatpacking Plant to
personally
help that quack professor and his hybrid fishpeople finish their work. Idjits who thought a few specks of comet glycine could alter human genetic nature for the better.

Well, it couldn't, boys and girls, not without superior extraterrestrial direction—the Pied Piper's direction. Those marinated fish heads would never say no to a fallen angel, to a scion of the silver floating cities. Hell, they'd be delighted to cooperate. He'd show them what panspermial species “enhancement” really looked like: positively sacred.

Obliterating every human grub and substituting the best qualities of himself and his three perfect children. Raw intelligence so you never strained your brain, precognizance so you never tripped on the sidewalk, immortality so you almost never died, and even wings so you could fly—

But how to get from here to there? Play nice with the soldiers downstairs? Beg a ride on their swell helicopter? In olden times when Mr. P. wanted to get the human grubs to do his bidding, he played a game called
Verräter
—Traitor
.
A simple-enough game for old Hamelin in medieval Saxony, as people were already frightened out of their wits at black cats or pigs that looked at them. If a sentry or a night watchman spotted a stranger along the dark parapet, he immediately demanded, “Friend or Foe?”

Before the man could answer you'd shriek
“Verräter!”
and stab the fellow in the neck. You could set whole barracks at each other's throats in the middle of the night, one cretin stabbing another until cooler heads prevailed. Then blame the casualties on witches and Jews.

But in modern times the Pied Piper could take advantage of the confused human mind from every angle on his flat-screen TV; his PlayStation controller put him in places simultaneously: a first-person shooter with thermal high-resolution imaging and night vision. Outside the San Remo, the Special Locator Troops were trigger-happy. The tank locked and loaded; the helicopter's minigun safety off. Everyone more than ready to blast everyone else to kingdom come. With a few flicks and twists of his PlayStation controller he could light up the street like New Year's Eve. All the Piper had to say was
Bang bang, you're dead
.

But suddenly he paused.
Think this through.…

Was all this violence strictly necessary? A stray round might disable the helicopter. No, there were simpler methods, much less messy.

The Piper shifted his attention to the troopers on the street securing the San Remo. Those eyes you're seeing with, you don't really need them.
Gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to hysterical blindness
.

With a click of his PlayStation, the men surrounding the apartment building lost their sight. A sudden gasp went up. They dropped their guns, ripped off their gas masks, and shuffled about, finally groping each other in fear and silence. A Special Locator Team member moaned, “Oh, God…”

Now he turned his PlayStation to the four troopers at the service entrance of the sixth-floor apartment. No need for uniformed mooks at the back stairs; the children would come quietly enough. With a click and twist of his thumbs the men by the service elevator lost their sight too. A similar gasp as the troopers sank to their knees, fumbling for the stair railing. Two of them stumbled onto the backstairs, panicked, and tripped and went head over heels. Struggling to rise again, the blind men stepped on each other, did a half-somersault, then rolled down the stairs in a confused human ball.

They lay on the landing below, one's man's neck snapped, the other man's ankle broken, the survivor mewing weakly.
See, there actually are wheel-shaped creatures that roll themselves along. Rolmen. And when they land at the bottom they become a meat wrap.

Mr. Piper forgot all about them.

Now for the men coming up the front elevator. When the sliding doors opened on the apartment landing, five of the six groped out into the hallway, all blind except the captain. The front doorbell rang.

Mr. P. opened the apartment door to see a very distraught officer, almost shell-shocked, discovering for himself that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man really is king.

“Why don't you bring your men inside, Captain?” Mr. P. said genially. “They can sit for a moment. When they calm down a little perhaps their sight will return. I know why you're here, and we have every intention of cooperating to the fullest. Let me fetch the children.”