Remote (26 page)

He’d just sent the Closer a message via the Stalking Ground website.  He knew Jack would get it, would in fact be waiting for it. 

But he wasn’t going to like what it said.

***

Goliath had been on the verge of losing control when the woman’s partner showed up. 

Goliath had never been patient at the best of times, and self-consistency hadn’t been one of his most outstanding features, either; he’d decided that the next time the priestess turned her back, or got too close—gun or not—he was going to grab her.  She could shoot him, sure, but he’d been shot before; it wasn’t nearly as lethal as most people imagined, not if you had the kind of bulk he did and the caliber was small enough.  Even a head shot was survivable, if you got lucky.

But then he’d found out who the woman’s partner was.

The Closer.  Goliath knew the name, had heard the stories.  He’d always said they were bullshit himself, something cooked up by the media or the cops—but that was when he talking to his buddies or a woman.  Deep inside, he’d always known they were true, that there was an apex predator out there hunting people like him.  Known it on an atavistic level, some kind of primitive recognition of something dangerous just outside the circle of light thrown by the campfire.

After the man had left, the screaming metal voices of the Mantises in his head had gotten louder.  They were—angry? Afraid? Gleeful?  He couldn’t tell, but the presence of the Closer had gotten them all charged up. 

For Goliath, it was the final deciding element, the gearshaft that everything revolved around.  If the Closer was real, then the Mantises and the Godfucker and everything else was real; it had a kind of solidness to it he couldn’t argue with, a monstrous sort of self-reinforcing logic.  If Dracula suddenly showed up on your doorstep, you no longer doubted the existence of Godzilla—you just accepted the fact that you lived in a crazy, fucked-up universe and stayed the hell out of Tokyo.

Then they’d sent him on another drug-enforced mental vacation.  It had ended here, with a heavy steel sledge in his hands, amphetamine singing in his veins, and the Closer whispering in his ear. 

Fuck it
.  Life was good but dealing destruction was even better, and if this was Goliath’s final exam then he couldn’t think of a person he’d rather have mark it than the Closer. 

He swung the sledgehammer at the door.

***

Remote: You need to call off your pit bull, Jack.  I have your partner.

Jack: I don’t believe you.

Remote: Here’s a photo.  She looks quite terrified, which I can understand—my right-hand man has a definite sadistic streak.  Not as outright brutal as Goliath, but we both know intelligence trumps physical strength, don’t we?

Jack: Let her go.  She doesn’t fit your parameters.

Remote: My parameters?  Jack, you’re overthinking this.  I’m not some textbook lunatic with a rigid methodology; I’m quite capable of adapting to a given situation.  I’m a pragmatic--I thought you understood that.  I have no problem with mutilating or killing your partner.

Jack: Touch her and I’ll kill you.

Remote: That’s the only threat you have?  I thought we already went through this, Jack.  Kill me and innocents die.  Attack me and your partner suffers.  You don’t have any cards left.

Jack: Not true. I have an entire hand—two of them, in fact.  And right now, they’re holding a sledgehammer.

***

Goliath smashed the sledge into the door over and over and over again, producing little more than a few dents.  Steel core, steel frame, heavy-duty multiple bolt-action locks.  He kept hitting it anyway.

“Stop,” the Closer said in his ear.  “You can’t get in this way.”

“Hell, I knew that after the third swing.” Goliath paused, feeling the sweat running down his forehead. 

“Then why—“

“Feels good to hit something.”  Goliath grinned behind the wire grid of his face-mask.  “Feel even better to hit something that breaks, though.”

“Go to the right.  There’s a window, shatterproof plastic, iron bars.  Should be easier to get through.”

He grunted in affirmation.  The house was built right into the rocky ground, craggy outcroppings flanking the front entrance like guardian golems.  He circled the one on the right, finding a tall, narrow window set into the wall of the house.  The bars were welded on, but the frame they were attached to wasn’t nearly as strong as the doors.  A few minutes work was enough to smash it loose, and then he got to work on the window itself.  Shatterproof proved to be a poor description when faced with Goliath and a ten-pound long-handled hammer.

He could see a foyer littered with debris ahead of him, and some sort of display case set into a wall.  A staircase with a number of steps missing was off to the side, and the bulk of a stainless-steel fridge blocked the front door.  

Goliath tossed the sledge into the house, then unslung the shotgun and climbed over the sill.

This is it.  The Church of the Praying Mantises.
   Goliath could hear them screaming in his head again, feel the speed roaring side-by-side with the adrenaline through his bloodstream.  Everything made sense, all the confusion burning away in a white-hot, glorious pyre.  He was exactly where he was supposed to be, doing what he supposed to be doing—the only thing that could have made it better was to be doing it on the back of a Harley at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.

“See that display case?” the Closer said.  “Wreck it.”

Goliath bellowed and emptied both barrels into the case, putting two large holes in the Plexi and sending a battalion of miniature soldiers to their doom.  He did it again, reducing the castle to fragments. 

“Good boy,” said the Closer.

***

Jack: Hear that?  That’s my siege engine destroying yours.

Remote: This is your last chance, Jack.  Call him off or I’ll kill her.

Jack: That’s the only threat you have?  I thought we already went through this, Mr. Remote. I’m
not
a pragmatic—I’m the one who won’t compromise his principles.  I thought you understood that.

Remote: I do.  That’s why you won’t sacrifice your partner.

Jack: This isn’t about what I’m willing to sacrifice, Mr. Remote.  It’s about what you are.

Remote: You won’t kill me.

Jack: No, I won’t.  But as you once said to me, it’s really a problem of subtraction. And I’m going to take away those things that really matter to you, one by one. 

Remote: You overestimate the importance of a few collectibles.

Jack: Do I? The piece that Goliath just turned into junk was made in 1876 by Roullet and Descamps.  It was worth at least fifty-two thousand dollars—but it meant a lot more to you than that, didn’t it?  It was a physical manifestation of a personal triumph—and now it’s gone forever.

Remote: You want to play, Jack?  You want to see which of us will blink first?  I’m calling my right-hand man, and I’m going to tell him to cut your partner’s right hand off. 

Jack: That won’t bring back your trophy.  Sorry, make that two trophies—Goliath just destroyed the dragon piece.  Made by Pierre Jaquet-Droz for a Swiss Countess, I believe, and valued at just under a hundred thousand dollars.  Oh, well, I’m sure you have pictures of it.

Remote: CALL HIM OFF NOW

Jack: See, this is the difference between a pragmatist and someone who’s really
committed
, Mr. Remote. 

Remote: You can reason with a pragmatist.

***

“Go down the hall to the right,” the Closer told him.

“Fuck that,” Goliath said.  He grabbed the hammer off the floor and headed down the hall straight ahead. 

No immediate response from his controller.  Goliath wasn’t really thinking anymore, he was moving on pure instinct.  There was another display case set into the wall halfway down the hall, a big metal dragon facing a knight; Goliath took great pleasure in smashing it to pieces with the sledge.  He had to resling the shotgun to do so, but that didn’t matter; he was pretty sure he could fire thunderbolts from the hammer if he really tried. 

He bellowed again in exultation, then stalked into the room at the end of the hall.  A kitchen.  He went on a rampage of gleeful destruction, smashing the marble countertops into rubble, destroying the microwave, bringing down entire cupboards from the wall. 

He was Ascending.

He could feel it.  When a male killed the leader of a pride of lions, the first thing he did was slaughter all his opponent’s cubs; that was what Goliath was doing now, except it was the Godfucker’s temple he was trashing.  He didn’t know what was so important about some dusty-looking windup toys, but they were clearly important to the temple--so they had to go.Out with the old, in with
him
.

And he was going to do it his way, because that was how you won the respect of someone like the Closer, who was clearly some kind of weird-ass Satanic counterpart to Goliath’s Godfucker.   Goliath didn’t know what that meant exactly, but it
felt
right—and that feeling, that intense, blazing assurance, told him everything would work out.  He just had to prove himself, like Hercules had to do—though Goliath was a little hazy on the mythic details of Hercules’ quest, something to do with stealing Wonder Woman’s bra—and then he and the Closer would be
in charge
.  That part seemed very clear. 

But in the meantime, while he was willing to listen to the voice in his ear, he was through taking orders. An up-and-coming deity had to have the respect of his peers, and Goliath wasn’t about to let a little thing like half a pound of high explosives strapped around his gonads intimidate him.

He was fucking
unstoppable
.

***

Remote: This childish display gains you nothing, Jack. 
I have your partner.

Jack: You know, I didn’t figure it out until after I was gone, Mr. Remote. My mistake was in thinking of you as a classic sociopath, someone who was incapable of feeling anything for others. But that’s not your psychopathology at all, is it? You view the world through filters—both technological and emotional.  Objects mean more to you than subjects.  You project meaning, depth, emotive value onto things.  It’s how you make your own emotions real, turn them into something quantifiable.  I was inside your skin the entire time and didn’t know it.

And now Goliath is.

You should think of him as an extremely aggressive form of cancer. He’s down in your guts right now, but you can live through that.  When he’s done down there, though, he’s going to climb your spine. 

You made it clear your actual brain isn’t onsite—everything vital is backed up online, so destroying your computers won’t accomplish much.  But what about your soul?

Remote: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Jack: Your little shrine to Eden Fawnsley. You’re in love with her, aren’t you? She represents something to you, on a level so deep you don’t even understand it. She’s a hillbilly gal with no education, cute but not gorgeous, probably dumb as a post and shallow as a puddle—but you saw something else in her, didn’t you? And the more you tried to understand it, the less sense it made.  So you fetishized her, tracked down every physical manifestation of her you could find—
but you never tried to make her into a drone.

Remote: Why would I?

Jack: Because that’s what an obsessive sociopath with control issues and a predisposition for manipulation would do.  But you didn’t.  Because it’s her
freedom
you admire, isn’t it? Her refusal to let others dictate who she should be, what she should do.  That moment in the reality show, when she chose to fight instead of run—-you wish you could do that.  But that’s not what you were taught, how you were raised.  Your parents were so worried you might hurt yourself they took that option away, armored you, instilled a caution so basic you won’t even let yourself eat hot food. The fear they programmed into you is so deep-seated you’re not even aware of it—and you can’t beat an opponent you can’t see.

Jack: But Eden beat hers. 
I’m not ascared of you
she told the world--something you’re not capable of doing. So you built her a temple, instead.