The Living End (20 page)

There was an unspoken “but” at the end of his sentence. I stared at him, expectant, until he coughed it up.

“Clark had a theory. A brainstorm based on vaccination therapy. He thought we could give a fatal overdose of Viridithol to a test subject, extract their blood, centrifuge and purify it, and use
that
as the active base for the final drug. There would still be mutation, that’s unavoidable, but theoretically it could be managed and endured. These were all just ideas on a blackboard, of course. We were hardly going to start murdering people to test a theory.”

“Got news for ya, Doc. That’s exactly what they’re doing.”

Bob rose slowly from his chair. He walked over to the other side of the cabin, staring out the darkened porthole window. I could see his face, haunted, reflected in the glass.

“I only ever wanted to help,” he said softly. “All my life, all my research, my work…and this is what they’re doing with it. I knew we were going the wrong way. I pushed back as hard as I could, and they tried to murder me for it.”

He wanted a shoulder to cry on. I was all out of shoulders.

“A lot of people are dead,” I said. “And a lot more are going to die if we don’t do something. What else did you learn from de Rais’s journals?”

He turned back toward me and shook his head. His hand fluttered in the air, playing it off.

“He had one idea, not long before his execution. An obsession, really. He had finally caught on that his sacrifices weren’t working, and he went all out in the other direction. He drew sketches of a great machine. Roped in everything he knew: geomancy, occult architecture, sacrificial currents, you name it. The idea was to create an amplification circuit that would harness a mass death and boost its power even further, sending it surging into his body at the moment he bridged this world and the Garden. He hadn’t even
considered
the attunement problem, though. Would have killed him twenty times over.”

“So he didn’t actually build the thing,” I said.

Bob wrinkled his nose and shook his head. “No, no, he couldn’t possibly have. According to the sketches, it would have been enormous. Thirty-six stories tall, literally. Even if you had the money, how would you create a monstrosity like that without drawing attention?”

My heart sank as I pulled over his laptop. I opened his web browser, rattled out a quick address, and turned the computer so Bob could see the black monolith on the screen.

“If you’re Lauren Carmichael,” I said, “you disguise it as a luxury resort hotel and build it at the end of the Las Vegas Strip. You build it right in front of the entire world.”

B
ob turned pale. His hands shook against his knees. The inside of my mouth was bone dry.

“She…she built it?” he whispered. “She actually
built
it?”

I nodded. “I don’t think it’s finished, but it has to be damn close. I got a look at the blueprints once—the real ones, not the ones they filed with the state. It was all zigzagging hallways and stairways to nowhere, rooms doubling back on other rooms. I didn’t know why, at the time.”

“The mystic circuitry,” he said. “They’ll inlay glyphs over every surface of the interior. The way de Rais conceived it, the
hecatomb
—the mass sacrifice—takes place at the bottom of the tower. The energy of the dead spills upward, caught in the net, amplified, and spun into a maelstrom of raw power.”

He leaned in and tapped the screen. His fingernail rested on the Enclave’s top floor.

“Here,” he said, “at the very top, a golden throne at the heart of the pattern, the eye in a psychic storm. Timed perfectly, the user would merge himself with the Garden at the moment the surge hit.”

“And would that
work?
” I asked him. “Is this just some fifteenth-century psycho’s pipe dream, or does she actually have a chance of pulling it off?”

He stared at the picture on the screen. His lips moved wordlessly, as if laboring over a hard math problem.

“
Doctor
,” I said.

He turned slowly to face me. “
If
Nedry and Clark solved the attunement problem, and
if
this Lauren Carmichael is a good enough magician to work out the holes in de Rais’s design—”

“Do Nedry and Clark have a copy of his journal?” I said.

He nodded. “Yes, why—”

“Then that means Lauren has it now, and yeah, she’s good enough.”

“The end result of the ritual,” he said, “would make
her
the portal. A living bridge between worlds, with total mastery of the Garden’s energies.”

“She’d become a goddess,” I said, the horror of Lauren’s plot unfurling before me. I remembered what Tony Vance had told me just before I kicked him to his death.
The things we’ve done, Faust. Christ, the things we’re GOING to do. If you knew the entire plan, the scope of it, you’d never sleep again.

“Theological quibbles aside,” Bob said, his face pale, “yes. She could spread the Garden with a wave of her hand, lay waste to the Earth and remake it however she pleased. I—I have to help, to stop her. Let me help.”

I stood up sharply and pushed my chair back.

“You’ve done enough,” I said.

Bob followed me to the cabin door, right on my heels.

“Please,” he said, tears brimming in his eyes. “I never meant for any of this to happen. I just wanted to help people, to make the world a better place.”

He put his hand on my arm. I bared my teeth, yanked my arm away, turned, and gave him a hard shove. Bob staggered back, slipped off his feet, and landed on the vinyl sofa. He grabbed at the slick fabric, trying not to hit the cabin floor.

“The only reason I’m not turning your make-believe funeral into a real one,” I said, “is because you’ve got a job to do. The smoke-faced men. Get them under control. If you don’t, and if I so much as
think
they’re pulling another stunt, I’ll take care of them myself. Then I’ll be back here to put a bullet in your head.”

He slumped over, face buried in his hands. His shoulders started to shake. I let myself out.

A brisk walk and the cool night air helped clear my head, but it didn’t do much for the rage boiling in my gut. Lauren Carmichael, the lab rats at Ausar, Gilles de Rais—working alone, none of them could have succeeded. It took a perfect storm to bring that much greed and madness together, and now that storm was aimed straight for my city.

Then the entire world.

• • •

I drove straight back to Oakland International, but there weren’t any flights home until morning, so I crashed on a row of hard plastic seats at an empty boarding gate. I slipped in and out of an uneasy sleep, lulled by the throbbing hum of a floor waxer.

A little after six in the morning, I went to the men’s room and splashed cold water on my face. Then I stopped at the McDonald’s kiosk, dug in my pocket for a few rumpled bills, and bought a greasy egg and muffin sandwich. By the time I shook off the last dregs of sleep and tossed away the crumpled wrapper, I’d come up with an idea.

I called Harmony Black and got her voicemail. “It’s me,” I said. “Call me back.”

Fifteen minutes later, my phone buzzed against my hip.

“I know where the other missing people are,” I told her. “They’re being held hostage at the Enclave construction site. It’s the only place that makes sense.”

“What? That’s ridiculous. Why would Lauren risk being connected to a kidnapping scheme by stashing these people in her own hotel?”

Because it’s not really a hotel
, I thought.
And because that’s where she’s going to kill them
. I didn’t say it, though. The feds didn’t need to know that much. Especially not this particular fed.

“If I can verify it,” I said, “can you do what you did at the New Life shelter? Round up a posse and kick some doors in?”

I heard her sigh on the other end of the line.

“We had this little thing called ‘evidence’ at New Life. A business card and a sandwich laced with drugs bought me a search warrant. What do we have on Lauren Carmichael?”

“You know what she is—”

“
Provable
, Faust. I need something in my hand that I can take to a judge. Without that, I can’t touch Carmichael or set foot on her company’s property. Get me evidence that something dirty’s going down at the Enclave.
Real
evidence, legally obtained, that’ll stand up in court. Until then, we don’t have anything to talk about.”

She hung up on me. They called my flight’s number over the PA system and I shuffled into line with the other red-eyed commuters, a flight of zombies headed east into the morning sun. I tried to nap again on the flight, but it was like sleeping in the terminal, just a shadowy imitation of the real thing that left me drowsier than when I started.

As soon as we touched down at McCarran, wheels slamming against the tarmac and jolting me out of my fugue, my phone was in my hand. I called for a family meeting.

Times change. Back in the old days we’d have our get-togethers at the Tiger’s Garden, but the Garden had a strict “magicians only” policy, and my crew had gotten a little more diverse lately. Bentley and Corman volunteered their place, and that was how we all eventually ended up squeezed into their living room, surrounded by antique bric-a-brac and the shadow of an empty, gilded parrot cage.

When I arrived, Margaux and Pixie were already there, sitting side by side on the couch and huddled over Pixie’s laptop. Bentley gave me a wave as he dragged a couple of folding chairs out from the kitchen nook. I jogged over to help.

“I think we can fit everyone in,” Bentley said, fretting over the clutter. “Corman and Jennifer should be back in a few minutes. They went out to get refreshments. I was going to make lemonade, but they thought something a bit harder might be advisable.”

“They’re not wrong,” I said.

He leaned in and lowered his voice. “That bad?”

I shrugged and gave him a gentle pat on the back. “Nothing we can’t handle.”

I hoped I wasn’t lying.

“Danny,” Margaux said, “where did you find this girl? She’s amazing! She just showed me a way to send money back home without making a ripple. No fees, no fuss, no nothin’.”

Pixie gave a modest wave. “Eh, it’s easy sauce. And taking advantage of big banks is kind of a moral imperative.”

“That’s what I’ve always thought,” I said.

Pixie shot me a look.

“Hey, Faust,” she said. “I hope we’re here to get some good news.”

Oh, boy. She wasn’t going to like this meeting at all.

Bentley scurried to answer a soft knock at the door. Caitlin stepped inside, cradling a bottle of red wine in the crook of her arm. She’d never been invited up above the bookstore into Bentley and Corman’s apartment. Looking between them, I wasn’t sure which one was more nervous.

“Caitlin,” Bentley said, his tone as unreadable as his face.

“I brought a gift,” she said quickly, offering him the bottle. “I know this isn’t exactly a social occasion, but it’s tradition among my people, and I appreciate being invited into your home.”

He reached for the bottle, but his arm froze when she said ‘among my people.’ Then he caught himself, forced a smile, and took the wine from her outstretched hand.

“Thank you,” he said stiffly. “I’ll just put this in the kitchen.”

Bentley and Caitlin had one thing in common, and that was me. They’d come to a detente, especially after she had saved my life, but he still wasn’t thrilled with my choice of lovers and wasn’t too good at hiding it.

Caitlin came over and curled her arm around mine. The doorknob rattled a minute later, and Corman and Jennifer came in with a case of Sam Adams. It took me a second to realize why Jennifer looked different.

Oh no
, I thought.
She’s wearing makeup
.

Jennifer plopped down next to Pixie on the couch, a lock of hair twisted around one anxious finger.

“Hey, sugar!” she said to Pixie. “Haven’t seen you in a while. How’ve you been?”

“Beer me,” I said to Corman.

He gave me a bemused look. “Since when do you drink beer?”

“Since now.”

He tossed me a bottle and cracked open one for himself. Soon everyone was sitting down, filling the cramped living room anywhere they could find a spot, and all eyes were on me. I took a pull on the bottle, swallowing down the bitter hops, and tried to find a place to start.

Beginning at the beginning sounded like the best bet, so I walked them through it, from the New Life shelter to my sit-down with Bob Payton.

“So that’s that,” I said. “Once Carmichael gets all the victims she needs for the mass sacrifice and she’s done ‘attuning’ herself, she’ll be unstoppable. We don’t know how close to finished she is, either. Let’s assume time isn’t on our side.”

“This can’t be real,” Pixie said. “I mean, somebody tell me this isn’t real.”

“We don’t lie to our own,” Margaux said. She leaned back on the sofa and crossed her arms.

I looked out over a sea of grim faces. All but Pixie, who looked on the edge of a panic attack. She’d seen some things since I dragged her into my world, sure, but she didn’t know how bad it could get. Not until now.

“No second chances this time,” I said. “We stop Carmichael, for good, and put her in the ground where she belongs. Her and everyone with her. What we need right now is a plan.”

“T
he whole building’s basically a machine, right?” Jennifer said. “Mystic circuitry and four-dimensional architecture, but a machine’s a machine.”

I nodded. “That’s how Payton explained it to me.”

“So we cowboy up. Crash the gate, guns blazing, and toss a bomb or two. Don’t matter how big a machine is. Take out a few cogs, and it just stops workin’.”

“Only problem there,” I said, “is the small army of mercenaries that’ll be standing between us and the front doors. I’ve seen these Xerxes guys in action, and they’re no joke. Their boss knows his way around our world, too, so I’m betting they’re bringing more than guns to the table. Brute force isn’t going to work this time. We need finesse.”

“Seems to me,” Margaux said, “we know everybody’s dirty business except for one person. The senator. What’s his story? He’s the glue binding this whole mess together. Without him, Lauren never would have met up with these Ausar boys.”