Strange Flesh (46 page)

Now I’m thinking that if Billy’s such a fan of the Marquis de Sade, then an asylum will be the perfect place for him to gain a better understanding of the man’s work.

Billy is late. My ass is getting sore from the concrete, so I stand up and stretch. My phone starts vibrating from a text:

[[email protected] ProSoap Alert]

Cam 12 - Unrecognized - conf .89

I’m about to ignore the message when I remember that camera 12 is the one in the alley at the back of GAME that leads into the POD. The only people it ever sees are GAME residents, and I’ve only gotten a handful of alerts on it. I pull up a low-res stream.

It’s no wonder the face comes up unrecognized. The person standing in front of the doors is wearing large wraparound shades and has a black baseball cap pulled low. But what stand out are the guy’s high cheekbones and extreme pallor.

It’s Billy. He’s decided not to make our meeting. He brandishes a security card at the camera and runs it through the reader. Then he bends down and picks up two items lying beside him. The first is a small gray
duffel bag, and the second is a comically large sledgehammer with a short but very fat cylindrical head. He’s traded his crowbar for a post maul. I’m sure Billy chose the tool for its aesthetic properties: the proverbial blunt instrument.

He hefts it and then takes a lazy swipe at the camera. The signal goes dead.

Oh no. Our plan is falling apart. Looks like Billy had a different one.

I radio McClaren and tell him the news. There’s a brief silence, and then he says, “Okay. Sit tight. We’ll get him.”

I feel deflated, like the starting quarterback getting unaccountably benched before kickoff. It occurs to me that Garriott is probably still in the Orifice. I’m not sure what Billy’s intentions are—though the presence of the post maul provides some insight—but it’s worth warning Garriott to lock the room and stay there until we get this under control. I try his cell, but it goes right to voicemail. Concerned, I pull up the bank of camera feeds from one of our tracking systems. Front_Cam_B shows a wide shot of the Orifice. To my dawning terror, Garriott’s not there, but Ginger is. She’s sitting right in the middle of the worktable. In his sleep-deprived delirium, Garriott must have forgotten to put her in our safe before he stepped out. I picture Billy’s hammer coming down hard on her head.

I take off toward the southeast corner of the park, thinking about the odds of getting a cab during rush hour. Then I see a hippie walking toward me with a beat-up ten-speed. I careen up to him and grab the handlebars.

“Buddy. I need your bike. It’s a matter of life and death. Take this.”

I flip my money clip at him, and he catches it with his free hand. Seeing a hundred-dollar bill wrapping the outside, any thought of resistance leaves him, and he steps back, allowing me to mount up.

I hear him say, “
Vaya con dios,
” as I sprint away.

I’m amazed at the time I make. It’s just over a mile from Washington Square Park to GAME, and pedaling furiously, I’m halfway there in less than two minutes. Normally, riding the way I am, I’d have been mowed down by a bus before I hit Lafayette. But as fate would have it, traffic is completely gridlocked the whole way.

I jump off the bike in the alley behind GAME and check myself briefly at the cellar doors Billy left open. The crushed wreckage of the video camera reminds me that I am unarmed, and that it’s often best to treat a man with a mallet delicately.

I grab the top lip of the entrance and swing myself down without stepping on the noisy metal staircase. I sink behind a large bank of rusting industrial detritus and listen.

A motor whines along with a high-frequency scraping sound. I see Billy kneeling at the door to the Orifice using a handheld angle grinder on its edge. His choice of tools is commendable, because the noise will cover my approach.

I slink down the hall. Billy doesn’t look up until I wrench his grinder away from the door.

I say, “I take it you’re going to want to reschedule.”

He grins. “Yeah. There’s been a change in plans.”

Seeing him smile at me in triumph when it’s quite clear that I’m going to kick his ass and then hand him over to the dubious care of his brother tells me he really is living in another dimension.

“What did you do with that girl? You little—”

Then I feel something to my right. I don’t know if it’s a slight shift in the air, but I start turning too late. There’s a soft click, and the muscles along my vertebrae seize up in succession like a row of toppling dominos. My entire musculoskeletal system ceases functioning. The sensation is not unlike having your man die in a first-person shooter. You don’t always notice the shot that takes your life bar to zero, you just find suddenly that your guy is no longer responding to your input, and then the camera crashes to the ground.

I hit my head hard on the doorjamb on the way down. The last thing I see is the man who gave Olya the necklace sneering at me from above. His lips move in some vindictive epithet, but I can’t decipher it. In one hand he’s got a sparking stun baton. In the other, a liquid-soaked rag that he’s bringing toward my face.

M
cClaren appears above me with a terrifying expression of concern. “Are you all right?”

I run through a system check. My head confirms that it hurts like hell. I can see and hear. Basic mental functions seem to be in order. I can feel my extremities, but—and here’s where some triple-distilled horror pours in—I can’t move them.

My answer: “No.”

McClaren sees me trying to wriggle into a position where I can see what’s wrong with my arms. He puts calming hands on my shoulders and says, “Let me untie you, killer.”

Before McClaren sent me to the emergency room, I established that Billy made no further attempt to get into the Orifice. So Ginger remained intact. The break-in was just a ruse to get me down there and out from under McClaren’s security umbrella, so that he could steal my iPod, and with it, Gina’s suicide video. While things are well shy of good, at least the worst case didn’t happen.

I’m even able to spare a little admiration for Billy. Since disappearing, he’s been hunted by a team of trained professionals, and so far he’s run circles around us with his illusionist’s ability to make us look the wrong way while he pulls off the trick.

I go home and sleep for a blissful two hours before I’m roughly shaken
awake by McClaren. I stutter out a question about why he can’t ring my fucking doorbell, but he interrupts. “Get up. Your boss wants a debrief on this morning’s tscrewnami.”

I’ve worked with Blake for a month, and this is the first time I’ve been in his office. He begins with, “Do you want to tell me how the fuck this happened?”

“I’m sorry. Events got out of hand. Your brother engineered everything from the beginning. Our meeting was a ploy.” McClaren had filled in the details on the way over. “He used traffic barriers to create a circular detour that snarled traffic all around the Lower East Side just so our team couldn’t get down to GAME. Even the guy I got the bike from was probably a plant. We should have been prepared for something like this. Setting up carefully rigged scenes is, after all, what Billy does best. We need to determine how he knew about the team we had in place.”

“No, you need to
determine
whether you’re capable of doing this job.”

So here it finally is. The imperious master lecturing his deficient servant. We’re not old college buddies anymore. I want to reply that I was the only one of his underlings who was able to locate his brother in the first place. I’m tempted to offer my resignation, but then I think about the Dancers and stifle the impulse. Luckily, Blake is winding up for a diatribe that doesn’t require any input.

“You take off half-cocked into a situation where you’re not in control, and without backup? We have a team of ex-SEALs on retainer, and somehow my little brother
subdues
you, and now we’ve lost the only real leverage we had over him. This is your progress over the last several weeks? Forgive me if I sound less than thrilled.”

“Blake, I told you at the outset—”

“You’ve told me a lot of things, but my brother is still out there fucking with me!”

I’m almost relieved when I hear the strains of a smooth jazz cover of Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” issue from my BlackBerry. I’d selected the song for alerts that Billy’s av has appeared in
Savant
. “Looks like he wants to join the conversation.”

I lean over Blake’s laptop and log in to NOD.

Louis_Markey is standing at Château de Silling’s gate. He’s got audio
chat turned on, so we hear him say, “Hello, James. Sorry about our misunderstanding earlier. But these things can happen when you make yourself the plaything of monsters.”

“Monsters? Where’s Rosa, Billy?”

He ignores my question. “And speaking of which, I take it my brother is there with you?”

How could he know that? Probably tracing our IP to an IMP domain. Or maybe just a good guess after the day’s events. I hesitate to answer him.

But Blake presses on. In a faux conciliatory tone he says, “I think it’s time we sat down and talked, Billy. Resolved our differences. Let’s straighten things out once and for all.”

This draws a distorted laugh from the laptop’s speakers. Billy adds, “It’s too late for that, Blake.”

“It’s never too late for a new beginning.”

“Actually, I think an ending is long overdue. See Blake, I know everything now. I know what you’ve done. And it’s time that you received judgment.”

Blake snaps, “Jesus Christ, Billy. You
are
a delusional little poseur. You don’t even believe in God.”

“But I believe in retribution. And where better to find inspiration than the Good Book? Are you prepared to be judged, Blake? To feel the flames of righteous vengeance?”

“You really played too much Dungeons and Dragons as a child.”

“Blake, you’re a seeker of strange flesh. Get ready to suffer for it.”

“These threats won’t look good at your commitment hearing.”

I’m not sure Blake should have openly declared his agenda like that, but Billy’s already gone.

Blake pushes away from his desk in nearly terminal frustration. He starts making crabbed “You see?” gestures. But then he subsides back into his chair. We stare at each other for what seems like a long time.

He lets out a tired breath. “You have any idea what he’s talking about?”

I think about his question. “Well, this is coming just after he saw the video of his friend Gina’s suicide. He believes you bear some responsibility for that.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Even so. How exactly were you connected with Gina?”

“I’m not.”

“Blake, I know she invented the Dancers. So there’s no point in hiding the truth here. I’m on your team, remember?”

“Okay. She helped in getting the project off the ground. But I was just brought in as an investor through Olya. Gina was the engineer. I only met with her once.”

This is a Blake I never knew in college. This Blake is uncomfortable. On edge. Given his earlier severity, I’m disinclined to make things easier for him. “But you knew her before that. Didn’t you?”

He starts to answer, but we’re distracted by sudden motion on his laptop. In
Savant
, apparently the world is ending.

The meteors come screaming in from a high angle in the western sky. They’re beautiful: startling confections of flame effects and smoky particle systems. His graphics card gives a hitch of admiration as the screen fills with fire.

Then they’re upon us. The first clips one of Silling’s towers, smashing it and sending stones and masonry into a small group of avs who are watching the spectacle. The meteor buries itself into a nearby mountainside, causing a massive explosion. The ground quakes as two more hit, one much closer to Jacques, and then the whole world vanishes in the inferno.