Orphan of Mythcorp (9 page)

I reached the records building five minutes
later. A spotlight was shining down from above the monstrous steel
back door. How the heck was I supposed to get through this
beast—even with some supposed helper?

A shove against the door proved I was right:
Heavy steel with flush-mount double-keyed electronic lock—locked. I
banged on it with a palm. “Ash, you frigging owe me one.”

“
Sanson,” a raspy voice.

I swiveled quick, glad I could no longer feel
that cold rush of fear run through my body. “Yeah. Who are
you?”

“
Nimrod.” That was it, as if ‘Nimrod’
explained everything. He sauntered up to me, a great bear-skin coat
covering a teddy-bear torso. When he stepped under the light I
recoiled. His right eye was an augmetic. It reminded me of the
cyborg eyes from that classic flick The Terminator. Nimrod reached
into his coat, withdrew a cloth bag and displayed it like it was
the Holy Grail.

“
What’s that?”

You could hear him breathing; each breath was
followed by a slightly mechanical whooshing sound, like an air
compressor pumping away.

“
Thermite,” he answered, with a smile
that was going to haunt my dreams.

Nimrod tied the pouch—Thermite, whatever that
was—over the locking mechanism. The freak then pulled a Zippo out
of another pocket and stepped back. He pressed a metallic hand to
my shoulder and shoved me back too.

Then, stretching out as far as he could, he
flicked on the Zippo and set it to the baggie. The thermite lit
instantly. Nimrod leaped back. A cascade of sparks lit up the
night. It was so bright that I feared we’d be seen by half the
‘Community’. Fortunately the mini exploding sun winked out almost
as quickly as it had ignited. I lowered my hand from my eyes. The
reek of molten metal filled my nose and I hacked a bit on lingering
smoke.

“
Holy crap!” I stepped toward the door.
Sections of the lock had so completely melted that I could see
inside. Nimrod grabbed my shoulder again.

“
Watch out for the slag,” nodding at
the blobs of metal at my feet. The smaller pieces were still
red-hot. Nimrod shoved me back and kicked the door in. I could
swear his knee made a mechanical whining sound, like an old
tailgate lift. After whisking aside the blobs of metal with his
metallic hand, he gestured for me to enter.

PLINK. The spotlight overhead exploded.
Shards rained down.

“
Yerk!” Nimrod bellowed as something
yanked him backwards into the night.

I stood gawking into the darkness. What
could’ve yanked that beefcake away?

Grunts and cussing from the evening gloom,
filling the night with disturbing sounds. “Oh man.” What could I
do? I didn’t know this Nimrod from Santa Claus. For all I knew,
whoever had taken him was in the right. And I needed to get my
curse lifted. So, I stepped inside the records building.

The grunts and cries died behind me.

It was pitch black inside. Why hadn’t I
brought a flashlight? Maybe because I’d never performed a B&E
before, didn’t know the rules. This was nuts. “What am I doing?”
Who was this Nimrod guy and how did Ash know him?

I felt blindly along the wall, listening more
than feeling for a light switch. “Dangit!” Something had snagged my
foot. It received a well deserved kick. This wall was a lost cause.
I backtracked, began feeling/listening along the left wall. “Ah,
there you are.” The switch clicked and halogens flickered on. My
eyes adjusted instantaneously. It’s one of the advantages of having
nanites roaming around inside your head: they function as
neurotransmitters and thus fire the appropriate synapses with
preternatural swiftness. I marched across the open floor, heading
for the wall of filing cabinets. There were about six blocks of
these cream-colored buggers, each one comprised of nine drawers:
this could take all night.

Ten minutes later I complained, “This is
taking all night.”

I slammed the second ‘M’ drawer shut and
grunted. Looked around. Wimpy fans tucked up in the iron-girder
ceiling were spinning, their droning like engines in my ears. As I
considered the idiocy of my search for classified files in public
filing cabinets, my thermo beeped. Body temp had dropped two
degrees. A press of the side button switched the body temp readout
to room temperature readout.

“
Thirty-nine?” I said. “Jeez.” The air
was getting colder quickly, for no apparent reason. Part of my
curse, I figured, getting that creepy sense again that someone was
watching me.

I stretched—because Dr. Wilmut had told me to
do that whenever I thought about it. Not being able to sense any
pain or Charlie Horses or any of the thousand things normal’s whine
about has its disadvantages too. Satisfied that I was okay, I
glanced around the main office. If the files Ash wanted still
existed, they wouldn’t be here, where any curious cookie could walk
in and snatch them up. They’d be hidden under lock and key
somewhere, someplace secure.

A door with a brass placard reading BASEMENT
caught my attention. The brass did not twinkle as it would in a
movie, but it might as well have. I marched over to it, tried the
handle.

Locked. A promising sign, right?

Like an idiot I wiggled the knob, yanked on
it, banged and cursed. The next step, naturally was to kick it.
Three successively harder kicks produced no results.

“
Dangit!” slapping the door now, since
kicking stuff tends to cause injuries. “Open up!”

“
Move.”

“
Holy jeez,” I jerked around. Nimrod
was standing directly behind me, a fat lip and a black eye (his
real eye, the augmetic peeper was untouched) giving him an even
zanier look than before. “What happened? Who was that attacked
you?”

“
Move,” he growled again.

I moved. Nimrod stepped up to the door,
inhaled, and then slammed it. The door blew in and hung limp on one
surviving hinge.

“
Wow,” I said, looking in at the steps
descending to the basement. Found the switch easy-on-my-squeezy
this time. Looked back at Nimrod. “So, who
was
that you were tussling with? Cause he seemed
ready to kick your—”

“
Malthus,” Nimrod snarled. “His name is
Malthus. He’s been hunting me for sixteen years.” He spoke slowly,
clearly enunciating every word so that I had no problem hearing the
hatred poured onto each one. “That demon has served his master long
enough. I have a spot picked out for him in my trophy
room.”

Did he mean a real demon, or was that
Nimrod-slang for jerk? “So ah, why has he been hunting you?”

Nimrod pointed towards the stairs, past the
door he’d just lambasted.

“
Right,” I nodded. “But first tell me
why you’re helping Ash. What’s in it for you? And how do you even
know a high-school boy? That’s like, kind of creepy pedophile
stuff.” Before he could bark at me again, my darn thermo went off;
I realized I could see Nimrods breath.

I only had one more vial of nanites left in
the case, and if I didn’t catch the 407 bus by midnight, it was
going to be a long, cold walk home. Zombies don’t like the cold. I
sighed and descended.

The taxidermist behind me was surprisingly
silent as we descended; shocking considering his obvious weight
issue. A nice guy would say he was big-boned, but really he was
just fat. When I reached the floor, he shoved me out the way and
started limping to the right. The drone of a servomotor was all the
noise he made.

I followed him.

Crates of plastic baseball trophies sat up
ahead and to our right. I thought to check them out, maybe filch
one or two for myself while the hunter went about searching for
mythical files. But when I reached in to grab me up a trophy,
Nimrod snatched the crate out of my reach.

“
Hey, what gives?”

“
Shh,” he hissed. And then box after
box of plastic effigies was removed. Nimrod looked like a man on a
mission, not saying a word, bald head sporting beads of sweat. When
all twelve crates had been relocated, I stood looking at an
enormous green safe.

It had one of those old chrome wheels
for a lock-crank, and if you moved just right, you could see it
trying to escape—downwards. One
huge
green safe. “So,” I said, scratching my stiff crap-colored
hair, “how exactly did you know this was here?” My first guess
would’ve been that he was telepathic and had picked this nugget of
knowledge from the mind of some records clerk.

“
I asked around.”

Somehow that didn’t make me picture him
sitting down having a cup of Chai with elected officials and
whoever else might know where any lingering Mythcorp files lay
hidden. I could, however, imagine him ‘asking’ with a hammer, or
perhaps with a length of pipe in his hands.

“
Don’t suppose you happened to have
asked for the combination?”

Nimrod might or might not have smiled there.
His face was so bruised and degraded by scars that it was hard to
tell. He reached inside his bear-skin coat and removed a real
tinker kind of gizmo. It was about a foot long, with tines sticking
out on one end and a knurled red handle on the other.

“
Did you steal that from Doctor
Frankenstein?” I accused.

“
This is the combination,” he rasped
out, and without further ado, Nimrod went to work on the safe, his
gizmo getting a workout under his expert hands. Whenever he twisted
the thing, his metallic right hand on its hilt, a god-awful screech
filled the basement. The grinding of the tines inside the lock was
enough deafen angels.

I covered my ears, sound being one of the few
things left that hurts me. “Hurry up.”

“
Relax,” he muttered. “We’re
done.”

After stuffing the gizmo back in his bear
pouch, Nimrod grabbed the helm-crank and cranked on it. A bit of
grinding and some elbow grease and he produced a real pleasing
click from the safe. With one final tug he cracked it, yanked it
right open.

Metal shavings fluttered down to the floor,
crimped flat by Nimrod as he drew the door all the way open and
stepped back. No sound as we investigated.

“
Are those the blueprints of
Mythcorp?”

He shrugged, started to reach inside the
safe. His hand paused mid-reach.

“
What?” I whispered.

“
Shh,” his focus zinged from the
innards of the safe to the block-glass basement windows. He scanned
these as if his life depended on it, the bruised flesh around his
left eye crinkling and the red pupil of his right, narrowing. “You
hear that?”

“
Hear what?” looking around, seeing
nothing. “Let’s just grab whatever’s in there and—”

“
It’s him,” Nimrod checked his watch.
“Balls. I thought my ruse would buy us more time.” He withdrew a
serrated blade, long as my forearm and just as cold and dead
looking, from another secret pocket. He seemed to have a lot of
these kinds of pockets. “He’s getting quick in his old
age.”

Before I could ask, Nimrod ripped the
moldy pages and rolled up tubes from the safe and stuffed them into
my backpack. Then he glanced at the windows. “Take these to Ash.
Don’t let
anyone
else see
them. Understand?”

Jeez this guy was bossy. “No,” I said, all
sarcasm. “I’m not sure I understood that last part. Maybe if you
speak slower and—”

SMACK. The metallic hand smashed against my
face. I didn’t feel anything, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t pissed.
He might’ve just broken my jaw!

“
Keep that hole in your face closed,”
Nimrod said as he dragged me towards the stairs. “I’ll go up first,
distract him. When I say, you run up and head east. Get those
papers to Ash.”

“
Okay.” I didn’t know which way was
east, but my chrono gave a time of 11:42. Eighteen minutes to reach
the bus depot.
Should be enough,
I thought
.

He had reached the top of the stairs and
stepped out of sight. I couldn’t hear anything. Three minutes
passed and still no shout. My temp was down to 60 and there were
only fifteen minutes left to reach the depot.

“
Come on come on come on.” What the
heck was taking so long? Probably Nimrod’s paranoia had gotten the
better of him and that Malthus dude wasn’t even around.

“
Screw this,” I headed up the
steps.

At the top I peaked around the door frame.
The place looked deserted. Cautiously, I tromped across the floor,
heading towards the exit.

Midway to the door, I froze. Yes, my joints
were seizing up, but that wasn’t why. Standing in the exit was a
behemoth. Fluorescent light fell across his body. His flesh was
dark blue, so deep it could easily be confused as black on first
sighting. He must’ve been at least seven feet tall, built like a
Mr. Olympia, legs like tree stumps. And in his left hand was a
sword.

That’s right, a real live metal saber, as
dark as his flesh, long as his arm.

My thermo began to beep. I wanted to rip it
off, burn it up. If I didn’t move soon I’d freeze and then this
behemoth would have an easy-on-my-squeezy time of slicing me into a
Sanson-filet.

With a bit of a struggle, I shifted my weight
and stepped forward. My assumption was that this Malthus—for who
else could he be—would not hurt me. I wasn’t Nimrod. But you know
what they say about making assumptions

The behemoth didn’t move. He didn’t move,
that is, until a shadow flickered behind him.