I thanked him, and said we’d be back to retrieve our imp once he was healthy. Mirella recommended the doctor not tell anyone about us, and also to watch himself. She didn’t come right out and say that the people who had shot at us might also be interested in shooting at him, but it seemed as though that point was made in the margins between their words.
He took the suggestion in stride, which is what you do when you’re six and a half feet tall with a twenty-foot vertical leap, I guess. Or maybe that’s just how everyone in Chicago handles the threat of imminent death.
For his part, he told Mirella to keep the area on her arm clean, and to expect headaches, blurred vision, and increased weariness. He didn’t bother to hand her any pills to help cope with those symptoms, but if he had and they’d come from Holitix, I doubt she would have taken them.
Mercifully, we were able to get a cab in front of the hospital without anybody using any misplaced German, and forty minutes later we were at the hotel.
“What do you think?” Mirella asked, after we’d made it safely past the downstairs bar and back to the room.
It wasn’t a great room, as far as rooms go. We could hear most of what was going on in every other room on the floor, which was problematic only because from the sounds of it, there was an active prostitution ring in operation around us. It wasn’t terribly clean, (the room, not the prostitution ring…well, maybe that too) the bed smelled of mildew, and the hot water in the bathroom appeared to only work during hours that were prime numbers.
However, the hotel remained perhaps the last place I would look for me, if I were looking for me, which made the other problems less of a problem. And, I’d seen worse. I probably had to go back to Victorian England for an example, but I’d still seen worse.
“I think I don’t like anything about Holitix right now,” I said, “but I can’t put my finger on why.”
“Yes, I agree. That seemed the most significant information the doctor had, whether he realized it or not.”
I’d been running through the whole thing in my head during our largely silent cab ride. Mirella had evidently been doing the same.
“Here’s what I don’t like,” I said. “If their drugs are used throughout this community, on the one hand, and on the other hand every variety of species is coming down with this disease…it sounds like a pretty clean one-to-one connection, doesn’t it? I mean, we’re dealing with a pretty limited information set, but even so.”
It was a dangerous road to go down, because I could think of a lot of historical examples where that kind of deduction led to the wrong place, and it was often a bad place. In the plague years, for instance, a couple of towns in Europe killed all their Jews because the townspeople thought their local Jewish neighbors had poisoned the water supply. They reached that conclusion after it had been noted that Jews weren’t dying at the same rate as everyone else. The real reason was that the Jews bathed more often, but nobody knew enough about the spread of disease to figure that out. And there was the old myth about how miasma—swamp gas—caused malaria. It wasn’t true, but sure enough every time the local swamp was drained, cases of malaria went down. Of course it did; there was less still water for mosquitos to lay eggs in once the swamp was emptied.
“I could imagine a scenario where their product was contaminated,” Mirella said, “and they were controlling the research into the problem as a means to cover up the truth.”
“That does sound like something a giant pharmaceutical would do. Especially one that catered to such a specific clientele. But nobody’s getting the same pills, right? Thelonius got peppermint for his pain, but you wouldn’t give that to a goblin, right?”
“No.”
“And it’s spreading naturally. You have it, and I’ve never seen you take medication. It didn’t even look like you were familiar with the symbol.”
“I am. And I’ve heard of the company, but I didn’t much think about it.”
“Did you ingest anything of theirs recently?” I asked.
“No.”
“Then you caught it some other way. Eve is another exception.”
“She’s an exception in every regard,” Mirella said. “Maybe she is the source.”
“That’s actually not a bad theory. If she’s sick, she could have been exposed to a purer form of whatever it is. She can also travel to more or less anywhere.”
“Even undersea?”
Mirella was referring to the second-most peculiar aspect of this disease: we’d seen it in a mermaid.
“No,” I said. “Probably not.”
She grunted and headed for the bathroom.
“There’s no point in speculating if the answer is a phone call away,” she said. “Dial the number. Maybe Holitix has a benign explanation. I’m going to go wash up.”
“All right.”
We were ignoring the part where she washed up before leaving for the hospital. Maybe Ignacius’s advice was on her mind.
I took out the cellphone I’d been using to call the island (I had two now, counting the one the driver for the Path gave me) and dialed the number for Holitix. I wasn’t expecting much—in my experience, customer service representatives aren’t in the habit of incriminating their employers—but I didn’t see any harm in trying. At minimum, the answers could be interesting for what wasn’t being said.
The number connected right away, and after going through the mandatory press one for English menu, I was put straight through to a person. No waiting, which I guess isn’t a surprise when one is calling a secret division.
“Hello, yes, this is Arjun, thank you for calling Holitix, how can I help?”
He did indeed sound Indian, but the kind of Indian-by-way-of-Oxford I used to hear in Britain.
“Hi I was…actually, I’m not sure how to proceed.”
“Yes sir. How can I help?”
“I was calling about a peculiar medical condition that I think your company is working on. I might have important information. Is there somebody I can speak to about that?”
“To whom am I speaking?” he asked.
“Call me Stanley,” I said, deciding to reuse the first name I took in Chicago. Nostalgia, or something. Not sure why I didn’t give him Adam instead; I just had a sense that this wasn’t a good idea.
“And what is the condition to which you are referring, Stanley?”
“Well, it’s kind of a thing where people…certain kinds of people…melt? I don’t think it has a name.”
“And you are calling from Chicago?”
I was worried at first that Arjun was tracing the call, but then I remembered I called a local number to get him; he undoubtedly knew what I’d dialed. Probably, doctors in Boston or New York or Los Angeles called different local numbers.
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you or is someone with you in a state of emergency right now?”
“No.”
“If this is an emergency, you should seek local attention immediately. I can recommend an appropriate hospital.”
“I understand. It’s not an emergency.”
“And you wish to speak to someone—”
“Look, Arjun, I know this is a strange call, but I’ve seen at least one human—an actual human, not someone pretending to be a human—afflicted with this disease. I’m trying to get answers. I think there’s probably someone there who wants what I know, and I want to know what they know. I appreciate that Holitix is a pretty large company, but from what I understand, the division I’m talking to right now isn’t as big. I’m sure you can get me to someone, and if not, you can get me to a supervisor who can get me to someone.”
By the way, I always thought telephones were a bad idea.
“Please hold,” Arjun said, and then he went away.
The hold music was louder than Arjun by a decent quantity of decibels. It was also the same set of notes on a five second loop. If you wanted to get a confession out of somebody without leaving clear evidence of torture, this was what you’d play.
/>
“How is it going?” Mirella asked. She came out of the bathroom in the same clothes as before.
“I’m on hold,” I said. “It apparently wasn’t a direct line to their finest virologists.”
“Of course not.”
Five maddening minutes later, during which I wondered if I would lose the signal if I took the cellphone down to the bar in the elevator, Arjun returned.
“Thank you for holding, Stanley,” he said. “I have a few more questions.”
“Sure, go ahead.”
“Can you tell us how you obtained this private number?”
“I’m sorry, I’d rather not.”
I probably could have, but for some reason the way he asked made me think it wasn’t something I should be handing over. The use of the word private, certainly implied Dr. Ignacius had crossed some kind of line.
“That is all right. And you are a human, is that correct?”
“Yes. How did you know? I didn’t tell you this.”
He ignored the question.
“Are you alone right now?” he asked.
“Am I alone?” I looked over at Mirella, who shook her head. “Yeah, I am, but I don’t see how that’s relevant.”
“Are you certain? Please, bear with me. I ask because we have an active concern that you may be sharing a room with someone who is afflicted, and as you have said yourself, even humans could become ill. Are you alone, Stanley?”
“I told you, I’m…why are you asking this?”
“As I said, for your well-being.”
“Right, except you already told me if this was an emergency I should go to a hospital, and I already told you it isn’t, so why do you want to know if there’s anyone else here?”
“As I said—”
“Yeah. I think I’d like to speak to a supervisor.”
“Yes, I understand. Please hold.”
“This is weird,” I said to Mirella, as the five-note hold music came back. “Is this weird? This feels weird.”
“What are they saying?” she asked.
She was busy looking out the window, which was a long-standing habit of hers. It was probably why her dream house, on the island, had no outer walls; she could stare in any direction without getting up.
The hotel room window had a crappy view. It was of the front of the building and the street, so there were certainly worse views available, but since the street and the hotel were crappy, thus was the view.
“He’s just asking a lot of strange questions,” I said.
“Maybe they’re only strange to you. When was the last time you had to deal with a customer service person on the phone?”
“I guess.”
Arjun returned again after only a minute.
“Thank you once more for waiting, Stanley. I will transfer you to my supervisor in a moment.”
“All right, thanks.”
“Adam,” Mirella said.
“I only have another question,” Arjun said.
I sighed.
“All right.”
“Adam,” Mirella repeated. I didn’t really catch the urgency in her voice when I should have.
“We have you at this address, is it correct?” Arjun said. Then he read off the address of the hotel.
“Wait, how did you get that?” I asked.
“Can you tell us what the room number is?”
“Hang up the phone!” Mirella barked.
“It’s only so we may assist you better,” Arjun said, before I disconnected the call.
“What is it?” I asked, not yet processing what just happened on the call. “Did you see something, or did you just want me off the phone again?”
Mirella closed the curtain and drew her sword.
“No, I saw something,” she said. “They’re here for us. We have to go.”
12
I’m not a huge fan of coincidence, as an explanation of concurrent events. It’s a difficult line to straddle, because it’s incredibly easy to draw conclusions based on one thing happening before the other, in the this therefore caused that vein. Where one tends to go astray is in the impossibility of this causing that, which is basically my problem with astrology as a whole. (I’m saying this as someone who used to be employed as an astrologer by kings.) Lean too far the other way, though, and you find yourself excusing two things that should absolutely be considered related.
For example: we’ve been trying to figure out which well-financed individual decided to put out a contract hit on me, while at the same time also trying to track down the source of the disease that was evidently gearing up to kill everyone. These appeared to be entirely separate things, with the first thing only showing up as an unfortunate hindrance in our efforts to resolve the second thing.
But now the two problems were dovetailing in a way that led to two possible conclusions: either it was a coincidence I happened to be speaking to a guy from Holitix at the same time our location was sussed out by whoever Mirella had seen out of the window; or the guy I was talking to tipped off the hit squad as to our location. Given I’d been on and off of hold for something like a half an hour, and Arjen the customer service rep had, in that time, traced the phone I was using well enough to read the address back to me, I was definitely on board with the latter explanation.
Holitix certainly had deep enough pockets to pay a ransom for my head. I had no clue why they would ever want to do that, but one thing at a time.
“You’re sure?” I asked Mirella, while jumping off the bed to retrieve the suitcases from beneath it. She was wearing an army of knives and had a sword in her hand, but there was more equipment in the luggage, and I needed to arm myself with something.
“I’m very sure, yes. I saw seven, but there may be more. Two goblins, an elf, three humans, and a werewolf.”
I found another sword, and tried it out.
Her swords always felt too light to me, but it was sharper than my fist and it had a better reach, so it would have to do until I disarmed someone and traded up.
This was the moment when I wished I hadn’t gotten rid of Rick’s shotgun.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Not that it matters. We’re in a fight either way.”
“Maybe we can get out the back before they close off the stairs. Or the roof. I think we can make a jump to the next building. We have time; they don’t know what room we’re in.”
“They’ll find out quickly. One of them arrived in a police car, and this doesn’t seem like the kind of establishment that would take any legal risks to protect our right to privacy.”
“No it doesn’t. So, what do you want to do?”
“Kill all of them and flee the city? That went well last time.”
“I was really hoping to flee the city without killing anyone first. That creates a lot of noise, and I like this country.”
“I’m afraid we’re past being able to make that choice for ourselves, Adam.”
She got to the door, opened it, and peeked down the hall.
“It’s clear,” she said. “Are you ready?”
“I’m ready. Are we going up or down?”
“That will depend on which direction they’re coming from.”
“Kind of like how we hunted mammoths.”
This was odd enough to earn a perplexed look over her shoulder.
“Except we’re the mammoths,” I added.
“I don’t like this analogy. The mammoths didn’t do so well.”
She peeked out the door again.
“Run right,” she said, then stepped out of the room.
We took off down the hall, away from the bank of elevators. The elevators were positioned at the left end of the hall, rather than in the middle, like they would be in a rationally designed building. The direction we were heading terminated at one of the two stairwells. (The other stairwell was next to the elevators.)
We didn’t quite make it to the stairs when we heard the elevator ding. A guy jumped out, look
ed down the hall, spotted us, and reached the appropriate conclusion.
“Stop!” he shouted.
I turned to catch a glimpse: it was the police officer. He was human, and he already had his gun out.
By the time he was ready to bring the gun to bear and take a shot at us, we were already on the other side of the steel fire door which led to the stairway landing.
Through the square peekaboo window, I saw another door open in the hall, in response to his shout and the sound of our running.
“Get back in your room!” the cop (I was assuming he was a real cop) ordered, as he sprinted our way.
“That’s only one of them,” I said. “Wonder where the rest are.”
Mirella was looking down. There was a straight drop to the ground floor—we were on the fourth—down the middle of the stairwell.
“Two more on their way up, she whispered. “Keep the officer occupied until I get back.”
I didn’t get a chance to ask her what she meant by that—I mean, I had a good idea, but this was a cop, and killing cops was extra bad—because she had already jumped by then.
I heard her land a couple of flights down, not because she made a lot of noise when she landed, but because there was a great deal of violence involved in her arrival. What I could pick up made it sound as if things were going great for our side, but it was tough to pay close attention, as I was soon fully occupied by the policeman.
He was a big guy. Older, but fit. Once he opened the door, I knew exactly what kind of battle I was in for, because it was obvious immediately that he didn’t know what to do with himself if he didn’t have a gun in his hand. (That I was in for a battle at all was equally self-evident. He wasn’t there to take me into custody.)
The problem—for him—was that he lost the gun right away. He came through the doorway without checking his blinds first, assuming we’d gone either up or down. This wasn’t bad thinking, not really. Most people, on discovering an armed man yelling at them tend to continue running until they’re out of room, and the introduction of a badge to the dynamic probably doesn’t change that. He wasn’t prepared for an ambush, basically. And even if had been, he still entered the stairwell with the gun ahead of the rest of him, which is almost always a bad idea, because the gun doesn’t have any eyes of its own.
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