“So you’re not going to do it?”
“I will do it. But you should remember that luck is your god, and one day your god will turn his back on you.”
She left the main cabin with a cell phone, to reach out to the local way-station and arrange for my needs. Those needs didn’t extend beyond my needing a driver and a place to crash for a day or two, so leaving the cabin wasn’t really necessary, but while she was doing that I had to explain the plan to Mirella. That seemed like something needing privacy.
Mirella looked pale, and terribly weak, which was something I’d never have used to describe her before. Her eyes blinked open.
“You are sending me away,” she said.
“You heard.”
She nodded.
“I tried to vocalize a protest,” she said, “but the very fact that I wasn’t able to, suggests perhaps you’re right. I’m only a liability at this juncture.”
“You’ll beat this.”
She smiled, and sat up.
“Whether I do or not, I don’t believe my chances improve on the island. Better to keep me here and take the vampire with you. She’s right, you need someone by your side.”
“It’s like you’ve both forgotten how old I am,” I said. “I’ve made it most of my life without any kind of tactical support.”
“Yes. In the days when the best defense against a foe was a larger rock, you did indeed survive. This is a different world, Adam.”
“I’ll be fine. You don’t get to worry about me.”
“No. Guns.”
“What?”
“Get yourself some guns.”
This was the first time I’d ever had firearms recommended to me by a goblin, so I took it seriously.
“I’ll take one of your swords,” I said.
“Yes, do that. And some guns. This is not about your combat skill. She’s wrong, you know; it’s more than luck. You’ve survived this long by controlling the circumstances under which your life might be at risk, and by running from the fire when it became necessary. You are not right now in control, and you’re running in the wrong direction, and this is why she is worried, as am I.”
“All right, fine. I’ll load up.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
They did sort of have a point, between the two of them. As Eloise said, luck has been a major component, probably more so than I spend a lot of time thinking about. For example, I’ve never died in an earthquake, despite that being the kind of thing one can neither defend against nor predict. And, they’re very difficult to run away from, and I can’t fly.
But to Mirella’s point, I also excel at being the cleverest person in the room, and being sufficiently observant to recognize a threat before it becomes a threat, and then either removing myself from the situation or preemptively improving my odds. I did this by surrounding myself with people more lethal than I am.
Mirella and Eloise were both significantly more lethal, and here I was, putting them on a plane and sending them away.
It wasn’t just out of character; it was a really bad idea in general.
I was gonna do it anyway.
Mirella nodded slowly, either accepting that I would do as promised and obtain some guns, or deciding there was nothing more she could say to convince me she was correct.
She reached out and took my hand. Her grip was hot and moist. I could feel her trembling.
“Listen,” she said. “If this is the last time—”
“Don’t say that.”
She sighed, took a steadying breath, and tried again.
“If this is our last time together, I want you to know that I would rather to have died in your company, than like this.”
“We’ll see each other again,” I said. “I’ll find a cure, you’ll get better, and then there will be plenty of chances to die fighting by my side.”
“That would be nice.”
We hugged, and kissed, and then I waited until she drifted off to sleep again, which wasn’t long.
Eloise was standing at the edge of the cabin, meanwhile, looking concerned. Privacy on a plane this size wasn’t really possible, but she managed to give it to us by slipping into the bathroom. A human might have accomplished the same thing by moving to the cockpit, or stepping outside, but the sun was up.
“What is it?” I asked quietly.
“The local news,” she said, shoving a tablet in my hands.
There was a time when, if you missed the live broadcast of the news, you had to wait for the next time a story came up in another broadcast, or until the next day when it hit the newspapers. Nowadays, news stories were broken into three minute recordings and put online, so people could watch it on a loop all day long if they wanted to.
There were occasions when I thought this new approach to information distribution was much better. This wasn’t one of those times. If anything, this moment made me long for when someone had to run twenty-six miles to deliver war updates.
I hit play.
“We have breaking news on the hotel homicides—a story we’ve been following all morning. As reported, at least five people were killed overnight in what police are calling a misunderstanding turned violent.
“Chicago police now say they are looking for this man, in connection with last night’s incident. We are told his name is Adam. No last name was provided. He is considered armed, and extremely dangerous.
“If you see someone matching his description, police ask that you call the hotline on the bottom of the screen, and do not attempt to approach or apprehend him. Again: he is considered armed and extremely dangerous. If you see him, do not approach. Call the police immediately, at the number below.”
The man in the photo was me.
“They called you Adam,” Eloise said. “Is that not the name you’ve been using?”
“It is. Must have gotten the information from the hospital. The security camera footage too. But this is too fast. This is way too fast. Is this a local feed? How many people are seeing this?”
“Is it local? Yes, I think so, but it’s all about the Internet. It is everywhere.”
“Great. That’s perfect.”
“This settles it,” she said. “You are not safe here. Come with us. If you still believe this Holitix is the one…there are other locations, yes?”
“Yes, but no. I just need a couple of days. This is where the trail goes cold, and if I don’t figure out where it picks up again, I’m never going to slay this dragon. Otherwise…”
I nodded toward Mirella.
“Otherwise, I think people die,” I said. “Besides, I don’t think you understand what this means. If that news story is on the Internet, it isn’t just a part of Illinois that now knows I’m alive. It’s the whole world. And I don’t want to get dramatic here, but I faked my death for a reason. The entire world is now theoretically unsafe. I can survive for a couple of days in Chicago.”
She sighed grandly.
“I hope you are right,” she said. “As you have run out of people available to come to your rescue.”
14
I have a complicated relationship with guns.
My first introduction to them came in the form of a cannon—large, barely-portable siege devices, either affixed to a ship or dragged across land. I considered them horribly impractical, and largely ignored the early adopters, whose insistence that it would change warfare meant nothing to someone such as myself, an active evader of warfare.
Those early proponents were right, and if I cared more about war I’d probably have agreed with them. As horribly loud and heavy and ill-tempered as cannons were, they performed one particular important function: they could enable an attack from a range outside of an opponent’s capacity to counter. Basically, if you were the first country in the neighborhood to develop technology capable of flinging metal balls a half a mile with some kind of accuracy, you could park your army or navy at that half-mile point and just keep on tossing those metal balls until the o
pponent surrendered, or you ran out of metal balls.
Then one day some genius looked at cannon technology, and decided despite the incredible risk each person near a cannon took every time it was fired (a misfire can be devastating, and used to be entirely too commonplace) that it would be great if a portable, hand-held version of the thing existed.
I’m sufficiently risk-averse that I wanted nothing to do with these new portable cannons, and so I stayed away from them, effectively missing out on the vanguard of the firearms revolution that started as soon as gun manufacturers realized customers valued not having their fingers blown off above everything else. I also, not at all coincidentally, still have all my fingers.
So basically, I came in late, which was okay because in the interim I almost never had a need to shoot somebody. Likewise, it was almost never the case that someone wanted to shoot me.
Once I learned how to use them, though, I discovered that I’m a really good shot. It would be nice to say that I’m just a quick learner when it comes to new technologies, like I have a gift for this sort of thing, but there’s ample evidence that this is untrue. (I will, for example, never be good at driving a car.) I suspect that I’m talented with guns because guns are used to kill people, and I’m good at killing people.
It wasn’t something I talked about or advertised. I think it’s likely Mirella didn’t even know I was decent with a gun until she saw me use the police officer’s handgun during the fight in the hotel. It’s also likely that this was why she made the suggestion that I arm myself extensively.
Unfortunately, I left the policeman’s handgun on the hotel roof. It was probably not adequate firepower anyway. If I was going to substitute an armed goblin and a six-hundred-year old vampire, I needed more than the six remaining rounds in that gun.
This was another one of the things that made the Path so useful. I told Eloise what I was looking for, she made a couple of phone calls, and two hours later I was holding a meeting with a local gun merchant.
I say “gun merchant” like this is a perfectly legitimate profession, and maybe it is in some parts of town, but those parts of town probably require that I have a license or something, and there was certainly no time for that. Plus—I’m guessing—most legal versions of gun sales aren’t conducted out of the trunk of a car.
The man who owned the trunk and the stuff inside of it didn’t seem to have a problem making house calls. He also didn’t seem to be in any way concerned about conducting this transaction on the tarmac of a private airfield, with a guy who everyone in the news said was armed and extremely dangerous. Perhaps he decided that since the fact that I was supposedly armed was clearly untrue—or he wouldn’t be there selling me guns—maybe the rest of it was also untrue. Or, he didn’t watch the news, which was slightly more likely.
After spending a solid forty-five minutes going over everything in his immediate inventory, I only ended up taking two guns. I’m sure this was a huge disappointment to the man, who after the first fifteen minutes probably thought I was outfitting an army. I had a lot of questions and never really faced an opportunity like this to have so many of them answered, and there were about two decades of weapons technology to get caught up on.
I didn’t expect to need either gun. Everything I’d been told about the facility I was about to break into, indicated this was an abandoned location that was at best lightly guarded to keep out stray trespassers. Given more time, I’d have had better information, because I would have scouted the spot prior to planning an incursion, but time wasn’t something I had a lot of. (Ironically, for an immortal man.) I had no reason to expect a large occupying force, though, is my point. On the other hand, my margin of error when it came to being wrong about large occupying forces took off on a direct flight to the South Pacific a half an hour before the gun merchant showed up.
Besides, I had no plan to fall back on in the event I didn’t uncover anything useful at the lab, but if such a plan were to exist, I could see it involving the continued need for firearms.
He had things other than guns and ammunition for sale. I picked up a bag (to carry the guns and ammo in,) along with a slightly used flak jacket, and a Bowie knife. I passed on the hand grenades—which I could hardly believe he even offered—and the sub-machine guns. The latter was too much gun for what I was doing, and every time I thought about a hand grenade I thought about it going off in my hand, which is not a happy association.
I paid him with some of Eloise’s money. (She was quite generous.) Then he wished me happy hunting and drove away.
It’s hard to believe how easy it is to buy a gun in this country.
The only other things I needed, to break into the abandoned facility, were a lock-pick set, and one of Mirella’s swords. Close combat was just easier with a sword, especially when facing someone else with a sword, and since we’d seen our share of goblins and elves already, it just made sense to anticipate seeing more of them.
I already had the sword, but the lock-pick set took us a while to get our hands on. The gun merchant didn’t carry one, Mirella didn’t own one, and Eloise hadn’t had to worry about opening doors since 1450.
Han and I drove all over downtown Chicago looking for one, with no luck. He ultimately ended up having to call in a favor to a local locksmith. What kind of favor a locksmith could possibly owe to a chauffeur remained unanswered.
I got to know Han a little as we drove around town, which just seemed like the polite thing to do, given I was implicating him in a large number of crimes just by being in the back of his car. Working for the Path wasn’t truly his job, which makes a lot of sense given that’s not really something with a full-time demand, and it’s also more of a volunteer/family responsibility than a paying position. He was a chauffeur-for-hire, usually.
His family had been in charge of the Chicago way-station of the Path since it was founded in the city, which meant I knew his great-grandparents from when I first visited Chicago. I thought about mentioning that, but decided it would be easiest if I didn’t. He acted as though my title as founder was hereditary, and that was fine. On the other hand, he clearly knew Eloise was a vampire, so maybe he would be cool about it.
Save for the occasional bathroom break, I stayed behind the tinted glass in the back of the car for the entire afternoon. The bathroom breaks were terrifying, by the way. They were in public places—side-of-the-road gas stations—and they were really quick, but I hated being out in the open for even that much time.
Eloise was right: staying in Chicago after my name and face were plastered all over the local news was unwise, and the longer I was there the more I was regretting not having stayed on the plane. Even if the story had already gone global, and the international interests who might find my continued existence interesting had already seen it, I was significantly more likely to be recognized in the Chicago area.
The last time I had to worry about something like this, in Boston, it was enough to just change my appearance a little: I shaved my head and put on nicer clothes, essentially. But that was to duck a police sketch in a newspaper. This time it was a video image, and it was on the Internet. Everyone with a smart phone could very well be carrying around an interactive ‘wanted’ poster of my face in their pocket.
Worse, because the Internet has the kind of reach a local newspaper never would, that image was technically available to anyone in the world. The very fact that people in other countries might know enough to look for me kicked off a part of my psyche that was evidently taking a nap when Eloise offered a way out. That part of my psyche was slightly paranoid, and certain there was no place left on the planet in which to wait this out.
Unless the island was still safe. But if I went there, it would definitely mean Mirella dies, and maybe everyone else who had this disease too.
By sunset, I’d learned enough about Han to make an imp proud. Likewise, he probably learned a lot more about me than he expected to, because while we drove around the city, I kept commenting on what used to be
where. If he bore any illusions about this being my first time in Chicago, I’d undoubtedly disabused him of them.
It was fully dark by the time we reached the edge of the old Holitix facility, which was by design. The fewer eyes on us the better.
Han provided me with a tablet with Internet access so I could do some research on the Holitix facility, which didn’t turn out to be all that fruitful. I suspected this was because a pharmaceutical research company on the outskirts of Chicago is only as interesting as it cares to be, and it didn’t care to be that interesting. I got a decent overhead view of the area from a map, and a few short news reports about the fire, but that was it. The website for Holitix didn’t mention the facility at all.
When it existed, the building stood at the center of a ten-acre compound—private land in a wooded area at the end of a private road. The setup reminded me of British country estates, where there would be a gate or decorative archway first, to mark the edge of the property, and then a mansion another half mile down the road that was usually not even visible from the gate.
There was a gate here. No archway, but they did have a big silvery sign with the word HOLITIX on it in big type beneath the company logo. Under that was the smaller “corporate headquarters” legend. It was set into brick and stone, and looked very welcoming. In contrast, the gate was a heavy steel barrier that barred further travel down the road, with a sign on it reading “Private Property: Do Not Enter”.
Han pulled over at the locked gate.
“I can wait here for you, if you would like,” he said.
“No, better not.”
“It’s only woods, and a burnt-out building. Are you sure? It would be easier to pull over down the road than to return in a few hours.”
One of the things we’d discussed was the high likelihood that I wasn’t going to find anything, this was a waste of time, and I would surely be reaching out to him again in the next few days for safe passage out of the city.
Immortal From Hell Page 27